Mindless
by erinflanagan
Summary: By Erin F and Hannah E. When a certain young psychologist discovers that Otto Octavius has become an involuntary patient of the Sporlock Institute for the Insane, she determines to help her old friend at all costs. Brand new penultimate chapter up now!
1. A New Job

**Mindless**

Chapter One

_a erin f/hannah e production.go yankees! apparently._  
  
…Hello?  
Can you hear me?  
Talk to me.  
It's too quiet in here. The walls eat the sound, the cloth deadens everything. I can't even hear myself breathe. I wouldn't mind if I could hear you…but you're not there. I can't even feel you, and that's wrong. I can always feel you, in my head. I need to talk to you, we need a plan, anything, to get us out of here. We don't belong in here, we have to get out.  
So talk to me.  
…Please?

…Are you there? Things are getting worse. I don't know if it's because I can't hear you or if it's something to do with all these injections and pills, but I'm starting to…forget things. It's all slipping, like sand running through my fingers. There's little holes growing where my thoughts should be.  
That's not good, is it? That's not good at all. And the worst thing is…  
…though I know I should be hearing you…  
…I can't remember who you are.  
Seven times xuV multiplied by a ratio of xp8 to the power of 9…quantify x and remove the…  
Quantify x?  
What is 'x'?  
Start again. Seven times xuV multiplied by this makes no sense and I know, I _know,_ that it should. Perhaps I should try something simpler for the time being. I have to keep going over this, in case I forget. I'll have to come back to that one later, that's all.  
So..seven times x minus nine times y is equal to three times x plus…  
…wait, that's wrong already.  
Start again. Seven…

…seven…eight…nine…  
Nine…  
I…I could have sworn…that I used to be able to count to more than…one-after-nine.  
It's you, isn't it? It's you not being here. I need you to think straight. I can feel everything's still there…all the knowledge…I just can't get to it. It's all locked away…  
One…two…three…  
Eight…  
Eight's important.  
I just wish I knew why.

I think I know who you are. You're something to do with these metal things, aren't you? These things that look like spines, one…two…three…four white spines with the ends all tied up to the wall where I can't reach. But the other ends…  
…I think they go into me.  
Is that what you are? If it is, then I think I know why I can't hear you. You're gagged, aren't you? Gagged and tied up…tied up like me.  
I'm not gagged, though. They let me scream as loud as I want.  
That must mean…that they think you're crazier than I am. Or maybe they think you're a bad influence, and that's why they don't want you talking to me.  
I thought at first that you can't have been very strong, if all that it takes to tie you up is a few little bands of white metal and some straps on the walls. But then I thought, well, look at me, nothing but cloth and chemicals holding me here and I can't even lift my arms.  
I'm getting worse, with the forgetting, I'm sure of it. I lose more thoughts with every injection. If this continues much longer, I may start talking to me and believing it's you.

Hell…  
Hell is other people…  
No. Hell is no people at all. No people, no voices. Nothing but me in this room with soft white cloth walls that eat the sound so I can't even hear my own breathing. Hell is hour after hour after hour of nothing but white and silence and white and silence and white and…  
…Hell is…  
…Hell…  
…Hello?  
Can you hear me? It's all right, you can talk to me now. They're not watching, and they wouldn't understand if they were. They don't understand that I can talk to you without speaking, that you can talk to me without sound. I remember now, that's our power, we can talk and they won't hear.  
So talk to me. We need to work out how to get out of here. I remember that there is an out of here, there's a world out there that's more than white and silence and white and…  
…and I'm stuck and I can't move and I can't hear you and I can't do anything…no it's not true I'm not making this up, you are here and you did talk, you did talk you did talk you did talk you did…  
Did you?  
Did…you…  
…I was…talking to…  
…me.  
I was talking to me.

What was I saying?  
…it wasn't important.


	2. Surprise

Katarina Morrigan.

Most people didn't know much about that name. Well, they probably did, but most didn't care much about it anymore. Six years had passed since her time with Doctor Octopus, also known as Otto Octavius. That time had been crazy, and she'd treasured it. She had grown to become extremely fond of the doctor. Then, he had told her it was time, time for him to get back to whatever he could salvage. He had things to do, places to be, people to meet. Accomplishments to accomplish, newspapers to prove wrong.

For the next two or so weeks after that, she'd heard from him just about daily. Then he'd stopped coming, and she didn't know why. But that was okay. He was the Tentacle-Boy. He'd do all right. She knew that worrying about him was stupid, and he could do pretty damn well on his own. Just as long as he didn't steal things out of people's windows. 

Only weeks after she'd seen the doctor for the last time, this thing with the fourteen-year-old had come out. She was smart enough to snort at the Bugle's vision of events, and had at first gone to search out the child – Escher Griffin, that was her name, right? – But schoolwork and jobs had gotten in the way. So it fell from her mind. Just did. 

She'd grown. Kept that playful personality, but wasn't always so brash. A little less impulsive, a little more self-conscious. Her hair had been cut short to her shoulders, curling in bleach-blond locks. She'd picked up purple contacts for show as well. She stood about 5 feet and 9 inches, and wasn't exactly model-material, but wasn't overweight either. She liked to consider herself 'average', but was really completely not average, not one bit. 

She'd majored in criminal psychology. Like this was hard to guess. She had worked in prisons and in courts, but none of it interested her. There was little as interesting as studying Otto and his tentacles. The work bored her, and she flew through it. Very not much like her. But she did it anyway. Another part of her that had changed. 

Her next job was in an asylum, a house for criminals that were insane. The job could only prove interesting. She strolled into the building in her nicest outfit – a white blouse and a pair of black slacks, with a pair of black dress shoes and her hair pulled into a bun. 

The building was stark white and gave off an eerie foreboding. She looked up at it and wondered what sort of mysteries it held, wondered if they could compare to what she had seen. With a shrug, she knocked on the door. It opened, amazingly. 

"Can I help you, Miss?" asked the receptionist.

"Um, my name is Katarina Morrigan, I'm here for a job, but not sure where to go…" 

"Oh yes, you! Fifth floor, make a right, and second door on the left. Ask for Doctor Mereii. That's with two I's. He had some special forward to tell you." 

"Thank you," She nodded politely and flashed the girl an off-white smile (not yet having the money for teeth whitening things) before heading towards the elevator. 

The ride was short, and she was alone. The building had been about eight stories, and she was on the fifth. More then halfway, and if what her books and peers had told her was true, she was definitely in the realm of the insane. Stepping out, she looked from side to side, noting the sheer starkness of the plain white hallway. It was lined with doors, and she knew what was behind them, and to be quite honest, she was more afraid than excited. Police work and criminals were one thing, lunatics were another. 

She counted the doors and knocked on the second one. There was a voice on the other side of the door beckoning her in, and she obeyed it. Closing the door behind her, she sat down and looked at the figure across the desk. 

Doctor John Mereii, a tall Asian man with small-framed glasses and short cut hair, put down his newspaper, "And you must be Miss Morrigan." 

She nodded, "And you're Doctor Mereii, then?" 

"Call me John, please. I'm glad you could meet with me, and that Karen reminded you to see me. She's forgetful like that." 

"It's fine," Kat shrugged and grinned, "Worse comes to worse I would have wandered into a room with a raving lunatic. Not much different." 

Mereii pushed a folder across the desk, "That's for you." He steepled his fingers and frowned at the comment, "I see…..well, It's nice to meet you anyway, Miss Morrigan." 

"Kat, please. It's what everyone calls me," She took the folder and watched John.

"Hn…" The man looked into the distance behind the girl's head and tapped his lip in thought, "In any case, I wanted to… brief you on your assignment."

"I'm all ears, John," She looked at him intently through her purple contacts and absent-mindedly scratched the scar over her eye.

"We understand that you have had experience with the psychologically unstable for quite an extensive period of time, despite your young age. The…reports of you and your experiences with Doctor Octopus suggest that even before you graduated college, you were dealing with strange or criminally insane minds."

Kat nodded, hiding the frown. The stereotype, she'd gotten used to. They wouldn't understand he wasn't a bad person and this much was clear.

"Therefore, we have placed you with placid, but inexplicable subjects."

"That's interesting," she replied, leaning back in the chair and letting her hair out of the bun. The ringlets fell to her shoulders and she twirled one between her fingers. "I'll see what I can do."

"You may recognize one or more of the subjects."

"Indeed?" The ringlets fell over her face as she cocked her head to the side. Pushing them out of her range of vision, she frowned. "Whom?"

"It's a...surprise. You are on the seventh floor, and I want you to report to me your findings. Is that acceptable?"

"Sure….should I go now?"

With a nod from the man, Kat stood up. She smiled as she stood up and turned, heading out the door and closing it behind her.

What surprise could they have on a high floor like seventh? She'd dealt with a few placid ones. One, Victor Oriono split skulls open so their souls could pass more easily instead of them dying a normal death. That's what he thought, at least. Robert Jones practiced vampirism. Those two were probably the ones she remembered the most.

The elevator dinged and opened. The hall was quiet, unnervingly so. She glanced down at the folder in her hand and read over the first page. She had rooms 708, 709, and 712. What had happened to 711 and 710 was a mystery, but that wasn't her business

She gathered up her courage and slid her shiny new security pass into the reader by the first door. The box made a pleasant bleep and she stepped inside the room, her feet falling into the rubber that coated the walls.

"Hello, Mister….Toren?"

"Hello," the sole occupant replied, standing up as much as possible. His voice was soft and impossibly mellow, almost as if he was waiting to die. "Who are you?"

"My name is Kat."

"Like the kitty?" he asked, turning towards her. His eyes were blue, a pale, faded and dead blue. She bet they had been bright once. Bright and sparkling pools. His skin was a sickly pale, his features twisted into a smile that the spider gave the fly.

"Yes, just like that." she replied, giving him the same hopeful smile, keeping near to the door.

"I'll call you Kitty, then."

"That's fine."

"You can call me Star."

"Well, what's your real name, Star?" She watched the man curiously, her fear melting away.

"Michael Alexis Peter Jare-Toren. But Star is better. It makes me feel closer to them. I miss them so much, you know. I used to see them all the time. But now I don't, and it makes me sad. I wonder sometimes. I think they took them away from me and took them all for themselves. They took them, Kitty, and that's why the room is so white. They aren't here."

"What are they?" she asked curiously.

"Why, everyone knows what they are. I don't even have to tell you; you be shouldn't even asking such a silly question. I'm not even going to tell you. I know you know, you silly kitty cat."

Kat frowned. If this boy didn't tell her what 'they' were…well, she had to find out somehow.

"You're sad they aren't here too, Kitty?" he asked her.

"I'm going to go look for them, okay?" She smiled at him, standing up.

"Okay. But you won't find them. They have all of them and they keep them hidden in a place that no one can go in except them, the stealers. Are you a stealer?"

"Of course not," she said, then moved to the door. He smiled at her again.

"Kitty?"

"Yes, Star?"

"Will you come to see me again?"

"Of course," She closed the door behind her and locked it, pondering. She looked down at the next sheet and opened the door, again deep in thought.

"Hello, Katarina Morrigan."

Kat visibly jumped. She looked at the back of the speaker's head, the straight black hair, shot through with what looked like natural frizziness that had been slackened by neglect. The head turned to face her, sharply, a quick-focus move like that of a raptor's.

If Star's eyes were dead, these were haunted, buried in frenzy and overthrown by madness. This was a man who had been driven mad, and she knew that immediately. This one was lucid, was alive for himself and not others, but somehow…not. Green orbs were filled with fire, filled with frenzy, filled with color, watching her intently, like a hawk watching its prey. Nor did he blink. Kat noticed this almost immediately as she blinked herself in surprise at his sharp turn. _Almost as if he was afraid to miss something…_she mused, then finally saw him rapidly blink his eyelids. He did this far less then a normal person.

"How did you learn my name?"

"Why, you told it me, of course." replied the man, cocking his head. This one would be a challenge; that was for sure. Kat felt that there would be no verbal games with _him,_ no reassuring 'kitty cat' and snow talk…not if she wanted to get anywhere with him.

"And you're going to get a huge surprise after you leave this room and go to the next one. I know, because you told me that too." he continued, with another twitch of his head. If his hands were loose, Kat guessed, he'd be using them expressively as he spoke, forming the shapes of his thoughts in the air. As it was, his shoulders and neck were clearly trying to make up for his pinioned arms, moving sporadically to emphasize his words.

"I...haven't said anything to you, Mister Karos," replied Kat, slightly uneasy now. She found herself glancing at her pad, just to check she wasn't holding it the wrong way around and displaying its information to the patient. She wasn't. "I haven't said anything."

"Oh, not yet at least. You'll tell me in a little bit. Or you would, had I not just told you about it." He laughed, lightly, for all the world like someone who had just heard an amusing after-dinner joke, and continued. "Well, in fact, you'll still tell me again, otherwise how would I know? I can see you find it a little confusing, but you'll see, it all works out just fine in the end."

"You can see the future?"

"Of course!" The man jumped up, but his current situation this made him fall back down on his rear. "It's sort of a funny thing, actually. I see things moving before they do, and then they actually do, so it's sort of like….seeing a visible echo of something. It's really strange."

"I'd…think," She blinked at the man. The flesh on his face sagged into bags that made him look years upon years older.

"You don't believe me?"

"To be quite honest? No."

The man chuckled and shook his head. Then his expression shifted incredibly, almost impossibly quick. He narrowed his fiery green orbs at her and smiled a smile that would have instantly guaranteed him a place in a psychiatric ward, had he not been in one already. "That's because you're insane."

Katarina was now very much perturbed by this man. A memory of a certain fictional character had just slotted into her thoughts, juxtaposed with that disconcerting grin. _We're all mad here._ "I see…." she said, carefully.

"Ah, but…" He smiled a little more manically. "Why don't you see your surprise in 712? You'll be shocked to the bone, I can assure you. I know you will, because I've seen it. But then you have to come right back and tell me all about it."

She managed an unconcerned smile. "Well, maybe next time-"

"Oh, no, you _will,_ Katarina Morrigan.' said Karos, suddenly serious, the smile snapping off his face in a heartbeat. 'You'll have to.' He angled his head, lank raven hair falling in thin strands across his face. 'That's how it works."

A little disturbed, Kat exited. She closed the door behind her and frowned, taking several breaths to calm herself. He was strange. And so sure of himself, too.

She walked the extra two doors and stopped at the next one. This was clearly going to be the one which, in both Mereii and Karos's words, was the 'surprise.'

Swiping her card, her hand rested on the silver doorknob for a second before she closed her eyes and pushed down on the doorknob, the door sailing inwards.

The first thing she noticed wasn't the patient, actually. It was the strange way the cell was set up – one wall looked oddly thick. Four long, thick and ribbed white cords ran from it.

Those white cords ran to the patient….

…the patient looked up at her.

Two brown eyes looked at her. Brown was slightly inaccurate, actually, for they had been dulled to such an extent that they seemed greyer then brown. More grey then most things she had seen, even. Grey as death. If Star's eyes were dead and Taros's frenzied, these were empty. Devoid of thought, like a band so stretched to contain information…and then the information had been pulled out, leaving only a deadened, stretched band, its use gone. But still…they were familiar somehow. She knew those jaded, once-hazel, grey orbs.

Bags hung under his eyes. But they were natural, somehow, not from lack of sleep. Sagging skin revealed he had once been a little chubbier. His hair was a mess, scattered upon his scalp.

"Eight…"

Jerked out of her reverie, she blinked, forgetting to look at her pad for the name of this one. "Pardon?"

"Eight's...important. I know it is. But I can't remember why."

She shrugged. "Perhaps it meant something to you a long time ago."

"Eight…octagon…octopus…October…"

Kat gasped. It clicked.  
She knew those eyes. She knew those white cords, or at least what they concealed.

This was Otto. The tentacle-boy.

"Otto…." she gasped softly, "Otto…what did they do to you...?"

He fixed the dead eyes on her. They were, if possible, the complete embodiment of emptiness. "That's...that's my name. Otto."

"What have they…….done…to you…?"


	3. That Other Girl

"What have they. done to you" Completely stunned, Kat leaned against the door, slipping slightly on the cold cloth-covered rubber at her back. Her face was flooded with a mixture of emotions- horror, pity and utter bewilderment all fought for space on her features. She reached out a hand to this man, this man who she'd known six years ago, but then pulled it back. It rested at her lap uncomfortably. 

If the man who sat huddled at the centre of the drooping cords registered her reaction at all, he didn't show it. He stayed still, regarding her without interest. His arms were wrapped firmly across each other by the restraint jacket, which had been modified to allow for the cloth-bound tentacles that trailed in four lifeless loops to the walls. 

"Do I know you?" he said. His voice was cracked from lack of use, a near-monotone. 

Kat drew herself up, fighting the shock. "Don't you remember me?" she asked, carefully, cautiously, though she knew the answer already. Those leaden, blank-page eyes told it to her. A vague frown bunched his forehead with the effort of unaccustomed thought. 

"I remember something about a a sun? And, and-" 

Abruptly, the words stopped. One look at his waxy face told Kat that he hadn't just lost his thread- he'd blanked Needless to say, when judging someone's mental health, trances like this were never a good sign. This was one of the first lessons she'd learned while grabbing onto a social life - that when someone stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, it was bad. 

It was nearly three minutes before he moved again, transferring his gaze from the floor in front of him up to her once more. "Do I know you?" he repeated. 

Kat made a decision. It was impulsive at first, but then her schooling kicked in as well as her logic. Her instinctive first thought, based on their friendship that had been so strong six years ago and the wealth of information she had gathered on the way his mind worked in that time, was that however Otto had got caught, (and to be quite honest, she didn't want to know) he didn't belong in this place. It was a loyal thought, but as well as being a good friend Kat was also a good psychologist and this was when her psych classes kicked in. As a psychologist, she had to admit that at first examination this man looked as if he had just as much reason to be in here than the other two patients that she had just visited. More, probably. At least Star and Karos had both been able to hold a semi-coherent conversation. 

So she gathered her feelings and rolled them into a little ball and shoved them to the bottom of her stomach. She took a deep sigh, and tried to step back and look at the individual in front of her like a patient. _Taking him out of here if he's really gone off the deep end will hurt him more then he already is _she thought to herself, _so let's see if he's supposed to be here or not. _

It was better not to risk showing her horror at finding him in this condition. Then again, she wasn't about to lie to him- that idea went against her training as well as offending her own sense of fairness. She was going to have to find a balance. 

And to do this, she decided to start again. In response to his repeated query, she summoned a smile that most would know as sardonic, but to Otto in his right mind would see it as her trademark joking beam, and Otto like this wouldwell, she had no idea. 

"Yeeeup! We met a few years ago. My name's Katarina Morrigan. Kat." 

"My name is Otto." he said, but it was unclear if he was addressing her or reminding himself. She had to consciously think about not frowning at his voice. His insecurity made her worry more and more. Even when arguing with his actuators, he was never this unsure. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. 

Kat's first thought was to jump up and shake him till he fell. He didn't belong here. And she knew it. His voice, no matter what it had degenerated to, slammed into the back of her head like a baseball bat, brought back her memories of that hazardous ion haze of machinery and microelectronics, mingled with the tawny old-leather scent of his old trench coat; that had been a sort of olfactory signature of the doctor and his creations. 

Kat would never admit to this, but she sniffed the air. There was nothing like that here, just a smell of antiseptic and rubber, the smell of those who had gone too far. It reeked of failure, and the attempt to cover said failure up but not really doing too well. The irony was, the smell that saturated the air around her was one of the only things that had every really bothered her. Kat had often wondered if she would ever get used to this aspect of her job, despite the fact that the nature of the profession she had chosen had often taken her to places that smelled the same of failure and decay, other such hospitals and prisons. It also reminded her very strongly of those pear drop things that her mother thought she loved, when in truth, she had abhorred the evil candy. 

She realised that Otto was now staring up into a corner of the cell, at the softly-angled place where the walls met the ceiling, weirdly two-dimensional in the harsh white light that devoured the texture and shadows of the room's surfaces. 

"What'cha looking at, Otto?" Kat asked, trying to find the energy to sound bright. She did, actually. And she looked for that energy in the hope of pioneering some kind of exchange. There was none, and when there was no reply, she turned to see for herself. 

To her surprise, even in this hyper-sterile environment, one life form had apparently slipped through the institute's net of undiscerning cleanliness. Up in the corner, in the delicate web it had created, strands utterly invisible in the light, was a small house spider, a tiny dark speck suspended against the arctic wall. Kat turned sharply back to Otto, whose eyes were still lifted to the corner- moving his entire head was apparently too much of an endeavour- and as she looked at those eyes, she saw the glassy beginnings of another tune-out blank begin. 

" Spider." he said, smiling faintly. The greyish was fading. But even as the grey faded, the brown did not appear. Instead, where it would have, was a fuzzy, glassy color. The color of catatonia began to embrace him and then the grey was there again, helping its partner to swallow this man's life in its essence of death. 

Not too much different from the mechanical actuators that had helped their partner, the doctor. 

And then, an infinity later, he looked at her and gave a half of frown. "Do I know you?" 

Kat's shoulders sunk, "No" 

"I didn't think so" He stared at the ground, his grey eyes fading as if to be absorbed by the rubber. 

"Tell me about yourself, Otto," she said, trying to sound as kind and welcoming as possible. She opened her notebook and poised her pen, watching him with a sad, forlorn expression. 

"I don't remember a lot" he replied, his voice hollow and empty. "My name it's Otto, right? Yes My name is Otto Otto Octavius." An eighth of a smile ghosted across his lips. "And I" He blinked repetitively, trying to recall. "I have more then enough arms." 

Kat lifted an eyebrow. That last one was spoken rapidly, as if he were trying to get it out before he forgot it. Made perfect sense, after all. 

"Eight. I have eight arms. They're mechanical." He stared at the ground, eyes intensely focused but hidden from psychologist's view. "I used them to create a suu.. no I don't have a son. I never never.." 

"Never?" She tried to peek down to see his expression, her stomach twisting again. The sudden drop in the tone of his voice, from that almost excited, enthused one, told her he'd blanked out. 

He had something going there, for a moment. He knew what was going on. Maybe if she got him to keep talking like that he could break whatever was holding onto him so tight. Maybe. Hopefully. 

She stood up, watching the blanked Otto. He was really out of it this time. Maybe it was reverse effect. The more he remembered, the worse he zoned out. Pondering this for a moment, she looked over at the doctor. She smiled sadly, then turned back to the door. She'd continue her meeting with Karos wait 

_He had said she would_

Shoving the thought aside, she stood up and walked towards the door, "I'll see you again, Mister-" 

Otto's head shot up and he blinked, brown lustre suddenly searing back into his eyes as his entire body burned with life. One could argue even the tentacles twitched as he rattled out; "Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present." 

"What the _hell!_" Kat turned on her heel and watched Otto in complete amazement. Though the words themselves had made next to no sense to her, the rapid monologue he'd just delivered had been anything but incoherent. It had, in fact, sounded exactly like a recitation from a textbook, prose locked away and so desperate to be freed from the padded prison it was trapped in. 

Come to think of it, it _had_ sounded like something from a bookmaybe even a book Kat knew. And another thing; whatever it was from, she was willing to bet that it was word-perfect. Nothing that sounded so spontaneously fervent could possibly have been anything other than verbatim. 

This change had been so sudden that the shock of it nearly eclipsed that of finding Otto here in the first place. Heart thudding, Kat took a step back towards himbut even as she did so it became clear that this coherence was no more than illusion; nothing better, just different and puzzling. He subsided as she neared, eyes half-closing beneath the hooded lids as if the effort of keeping them open had become too much. It was doubtful if he even knew she was in the room any more. 

Another illusion, and a chilling one, was that of life in the tentacles. As he moved, they swayed slightly, the loops at their lowest extremity trailing the floor, but it was obvious that they had no movement of their own. Now this _did _make perfect sense - Kat imagined that a cell like this would hold the tentacles in their active state for just about as long as it took to say where did the wall go?' The question was, what made them so inert? 

Heavy canvas and buckled straps held the heads to the walls, joined to the enveloping cloth shrouds that completely covered the tentacles' pitted alloy surfaces and were seamed into the back of the straitjacket, so that only the rough ribbed outlines of each arm were suggested through the folds. The snowy sterility of the cloth was so disparate to what she knew it concealed that she had to suppress a shudder. 

And then, as she regarded the arm nearest to her, Kat's gaze landed on the tethered throat' of the actuator, and this was very possibly the _real _restraint. 

A collar, barely thicker than her wrist, looped around the area just below the claw. Another integral part of the design, clearly. It looked deceptively simple and harmless, rather like a handheld remote that, despite its neat little palm-size appearance, happens to be designed to launch a nuclear missile. What could be more innocent than a small, shiny band of silvery metal, set with a single diode light that shone a constant, friendly blue? There was one on each tentacle in the same place, she saw. Each glowed calmly, almost as if they were sure of themselves, and for a fleeting moment, Kat thought maybe that those lights were a personality dominating the ones she knew well. Another second dismissed the thought; the bands were far too small to contain another personality which could fight that of the actuators. She had become strangely fond of the actuators and their rather unappealing personality, and looking at the dead segments made her sad. She missed the arrogant tentacles very much. 

Those cool cyan lights, she noted dully, were certainly a marked contrast to the sharp-focus, bloody scarlet heart lights that she could see with perfectly in her mind's eye. Saw Otto as he was. Tentacles and all. 

And another wrench in her heart. This was seriously bad for her emotional health. 

Seeing the tentacles so static was jarring, like a wrong note in an otherwise tranquil chord. She remembered them as things of constant, calculated movement, remembered the slow scanning figure-of-eight weave they slipped into even when their host was standing entirely motionless. On the rare occasions that they did freeze, in fact, they were at their most dangerous. When they were still, they were about to strike. 

This was no coiled-rattler pause, though. This was _dead. _The tentacles appeared completely drained of any kind of energy, drooping like snapped wires. If their heads weren't held vertically, flush against the walls, Kat knew that they would just fall to the floor, segments sliding against one another into whatever shape gravity decreed. And they would stay that way, too, for as long as those smug blue lights still shone. 

He looked up at her again, and to her despair she saw another vague frown begin, another question start to form. Kat didn't think she could bear to hear him ask a fourth time. Instead, she moved a hand in the direction of the nearest tentacle, "What are those, Otto?" 

She felt an absurd stab of guilt for testing him with such a basicwell, frankly, _dumb_ question, which if asked under what for the sake of argument could be called normal' circumstances would have won her a look that silently placed her IQ next to that of a lampshade, but she thought that it might help to try and gauge how constant and complete his memory loss really was. 

For a moment, he didn't seem about to reply at all. Kat was about to repeat the question, when all of a sudden the invisible textbook was back in front of his eyes, as was the fever within them, "Shape without form, shade without color." he said, fast and low. And then, with an eerie aptness; "Paralysed force." 

Before Kat could think of a reply, he was gone again, his head lowering slowly forwards so that the empty gaze was once again scrutinizing the padded floor. Kat tried to attract his attention a few more times, but she might as well have been talking to her notepad for all the response she got. Eventually, she sighed and gave up. 

It was time for second meeting with Karos. She'd find out how he had learned all of this prediction the future was impossible. She blinked several times, opened the door, and walked out. 

Behind her, a pair of lifeless, catatonic eyes gazed into the nothingness. And they wouldn't be stopping anytime soon. 

She slid into Karos's room and looked at the back of his head evenly for a moment. He didn't turn like last time, something that somewhat calmed her. Maybe he'd just been insane that time. One of those moments. Maybe he'd just been guessing or had heard about it from someone else. People couldn't tell the future. The end. 

"But I do."

Kat blanked worse then Otto at that, every thought fleeing. Thiswell, what _was _this? "I didn't say anything." 

"But you _will._ You were going to ask me how I knew that and that people can't tell the future. Weren't you?" Even so, he did not turn around, "I have an itch in my neck. Would you scratch it for me? I'm rather incapacitated at the moment." 

She rolled her eyes and walked over, her footsteps silent on the rubber. She squatted down and scratched under his hairline for a second. 

"That's better. Thank you." 

"Welcome."

Karos sighed and rolled himself over to his side, staring absently at the wall. He shook the hair out of his face and laid there for several moments, while Kat watched him intently. The back of his head was unmoving, but after maybe a minute of this, his body rocketed up so fast he pushed himself up to his feet and stood, shockingly tall- Kat guessed around six foot, probably over. His body was even lankier then it appeared while he sat, and the straitjacket didn't help. The girl's shock at the sudden movement was apparent. 

"Later then I saw. I must be getting bad at it" Chuckling softly, the man (boy? His age was impossible to tell) paced in several circles, muttering to himself. Kat looked up at him curiously from her spot on the ground. His emerald ovals sparkled, "I was off. I thought I would get up before you got here." 

"Perhaps you were." 

"Incorrect? I doubt itI just judged the time wrong. When nothing happens, one becomes rusty." He sat back down cross-legged in front of her and watched her with his hawk-eyed gaze. "So, tell me what happened with Otto." 

"Why?" 

"Because you have to, of course. I've seen it." His voice was smooth, his shoulders gesturing languidly, even though his arms were tied. 

"How could you have seen it?"

"I just do, Katarina Morrigan." He chuckled. "And it's impossible to understand why. Not even I know. I see things before they happen. And then they happen." 

"You're strange. Like him." 

"But not exactly like him. I can hold an intelligent conversation. But you don't think so." He smiled a too-wide smile, exposing stark white teeth. This spooked Kat, for people who lived in rubber rooms weren't supposed to have such brilliant teeth. 

She nodded. By now, she'd figured that arguing with him was pointless. Not only was he right, but he was sure of himself too. Sanity was questionable, but lucidity was certain. "Otto is..brain-dead." 

"They have him on so many medications, I'd run out of correct predictions before I named them all." He grinned manically, green orbs flashing. "And I haven't made a false prediction yet." 

"What do they have him on?" 

Kat was drawn to Karos. There was no doubt about it. Drawn to him just as she had found her interest piqued in Otto and his tentacles. The comparison frightened her more then anything else unlike Otto, this man was clearly disturbed- unlike Otto _had been_, she reminded herself painfully- and also, Karos obviously had no problem with using her perception of his craziness to unnerve her and gain the conversational upper hand. This was something that she couldn't imagine Otto doing- no, _he _had struggled to hold on to his sanity too hard for too long to ever think of using itor pretended lack thereofto play such power games. She told herself that it couldn't be the same sort of interest, after all. She had first been intrigued by Doctor Otto Octavius because, contrary to all expectations, she had realised- pretty much at their first meeting- that he was essentially sane. Chet Karos, on the other hand, was pretty certainly one wave short of a shipwreckand he knew it. More than that, the fact actually seemed to amuse him. 

But he wasn't amused by her latest question. 

"I don't know yet." His eyes darkened. "You don't know yet so I can't know yet so you have to find out before I can tell you or how would I know?" Shaking his head, he turned away from her, laboriously resuming his sitting position. "I can't tell you things you don't tell me, Katarina Morrigan. You have to play fair, or else we won't get anywhere." The bright eyes blinked at her, mockingly, over his bony shoulder. "No-one gets inno-one gets _out."_

"Idon't understand what you mean," said Kat, carefully. Chet turned his head away, once more giving her an uninterrupted view of his back. 

"You will..." he said, calmly. She was nearly out of the door before she heard him add; 

"in time." 

Kat stepped out of the room silently and slid the door closed. Her thoughts were hidden, masked and confused to even herself as she moved smoothly into the one next to it. Star was on his back and staring at the ceiling, her entrance apparently unknown to him. 

"Star?" 

He brought himself up a sitting position and looked over at her, "Yes, Kitty?" 

"What were you thinking about just now?" She walked over to him and moved into a lotus-style sitting position near him as he watched her with his jaded baby blues. 

"I was thinking about them, like I always am, silly. " He smiled at her, a sort of forlorn smile. "You are such a funny little cat. I always think about them. They used to be up there," he gestured with his head to the ceiling, "but then they took them away. The evil, evil stealers. But I'm happy you're not a stealer, because kitties can't be stealers." 

"Of course not," she said vaguely, not really knowing what a stealer was, "Who are the stealers, Star?" 

"The stealers are just _stealers. _They're so evil and mean and evil and mean that I can't even _describe _them. They would never never take me in if I ever described the stealers." 

Sighing, Kat mentally swore. If Star kept expecting her to know things, she'd never know anything, if that made any sense. "Well, I bet if you tell me what the stealers look like, I promise to go find out about them." 

"But then they'd hate you too!" He scooted a little closer to her. "And I wouldn't like that. I can't talk to anyone who they don't like. And all the other people, well they don't like them, or they're stealers." 

"Other people?" she inquired. Could she go somewhere with this? Would he just give her the default answer that other people were just _other people_? 

"People who come in here! They come and they look at me like I am some sort of little boy and tell me that the things they took away mean nothing! They are only helpers of the stealers and I hate them and I never want to see them again and I want what the stealers took back!" he shouted, throwing a tantrum. If his hands weren't tied to his side, Kat could see they would be flailing, and if there wasn't so much trouble involved with getting up in a straitjacket, he'd be jumping up and down. 

The child part was accurate. But telling him that wouldn't be the smart thing. 

"What do they look like?" 

"They wear white coats and call me Mr. Toren!" 

Kat's eyes widened in sudden understanding. Of COURSE! Why hadn't she seen it _before_! 

"Starare the things the stealers tookare they bright and high in the sky?" 

"Yeah." he chimed enthusiastically, but then his voice dropped in an instant. "But not in this sky." 

_I'm such an IDIOT! _Kat reprimanded herself. _Star! He loves the stars! And there are none in here and the "stealers" are the people who put him here away from the stars!_

Beaming at her new discovery, she smiled at Star and ruffled the boy's hair. He just about purred in contentment and leaned his head on her shoulder. "Kitty?" 

"Yes?" 

"You sort of remind me of them. You're bright and sparkly like them." 

"I'm glad I can make you so happy, Star. It's my job. But I have to go now, okay?" 

"Okay! I'll see you later!" He scooted away from her as she stood up and slid out, then pressed the button for the elevator and stepped in, the door closing behind her. 

Kat ran a hair through her blond ringlets as she leaned back in the elevator. She had barely any notes, and was purely overwhelmed. Star, cute but psycho. Karos, his visions of the future far too correct for her liking and his hawkish face haunting. Otto, well, that went without saying. She didn't want to think about it for the moment, but the fact was clear, she'd need help. She needed to know more about Otto in these past six years. Maybe that girl who he had "kidnapped" would help. Escher Griffin, right? She made a mental note to check the white pages for that name. And Spider-Manwell, how could she find him? As the door opened and she stepped out, her thoughts on Otto were squished into a ball in her stomach and she counted the doors to Doctor Mereii's office, then sat down across from him. The man looked up at her almost immediately. 

"I trust you were surprised." 

"Understatement of the century, John." 

Mereii leaned his elbows on his desk and scratched the faintest of faint stubble. "You will be all right in assessing the three of them?" 

With a shrug, Kat responded. "I don't see why not. Though I think learning about them is less notes and more conversation. More casual life, if at all possible." 

He frowned, something that seemed to fit his face very well. The girl absent-mindedly wondered if he had practised the frown earlier. "About the third subject we understand you have had certain relations with him in your past." 

"They were hard to miss." She frowned as well. She wasn't liking where this was going- in fact, she had a very good idea just where that was. 

"Mister Octavius is here for a reason, and any attempts at friendship with such a deranged mind would be rather hopeless." 

_That_ was over the edge. She narrowed her purple-contact-covered eyes and scowled. "What are you implying? Quit beating around the bush." 

"Do not try and get him to escape." 

A harsh bark was the response and Kat practically spat out, "He wouldn't know escape if it hit him in the head. He's so brain-dead that he asked me if he knew me three times." 

John nodded. "Quite understandable." 

"What do you mean, UNDERSTANDABLE!" Kat almost leaped out of her chair and almost growled, "How do you expect me to study a vegetable? I'm not some sort of psychologist goddess. I can't study a man who can barely remembers that THINGS ARE ATTACED TO HIS **_SPINE_**. I can't just snap my fingers and know your answers, John. If you want me to play shrink, I have to have a patient that can perform simple arithmetic." 

"You're defensive of him." The man leaned back in his chair and watched the girl intensely. 

His stare, however, had nothing on Chet's."It's not just that. I can't do what you're asking. I can't turn lead into gold." 

"You can find a way, I'm sure." 

"John, let me get this straight." She leaned over the desk, pushing a few pictures aside, "You want me to study Otto, correct?" 

The man nodded, and she continued, "You want me to find out why he did what he did, and give you a reason that doesn't involve the tentacles." Another nod. "He doesn't remember what those things he did _are, _John. He doesn't even remember he did anything at all." 

"I am sure you'll find a way, Katarina," he repeated, steepling his fingers. 

The amount of self-control that Kat used at that very moment was equal to what she had used in the previous year, but she just nodded. "I'm going to head back home. That all right with you?" 

"Your first day on the job, and you are dismissed. Have a safe ride." 

_Well_ she thought grimly, spotting her car and walking to it once she'd gotten out of the building. _That went.surprisingly unwell. _

Kat slid into the small Focus and put it on, backing out of the parking spot and out of the lot. Her apartment was downtown from here, and she wanted to get home. Wanted to call this Escher girl. She was edgy, and Katarina Morrigan was not an edgy person. 

Driving like a good driver was of secondary importance to the day. 

Star. Star, Michael Alexis Peter Jare-Toren. Well, what was there to say about him? He was adorable, and clearly over-obsessed with the sparkling things in the night sky, his namesake and apparent reason for living. 

She drove with one hand and opened a file with another, alternating between the road and the paper she pulled out of said file. Apparently, the boy had been arrested for a bad habit of climbing things and not coming down. Trespassing and disturbing the peace when people saw him outside their window and scaling their buildings like a madman. They'd thrown him in jail, and he'd escaped. 

_Thirty-two!_

She received a rude honk from the person behind her as she forgot to go at the green light. This jolted her back as much as the number written on the stat sheet. That boy couldn't be thirty. She had guessed him at maybe twenty at the oldest. The obsession had taken years off his body and his mind, but she didn't think this was exactly a good thing. Thirty-year olds were not supposed to look twenty or twelve. 

Butwhat was she supposed to do about him? His only care seemed to be the complete lack of stars in his little padded cell, and there wasn't anything she could do about that. She couldn't let him out though, she really wanted to to see if he got better. And she had a very interesting feeling that if he were let out, all he'd do was continue climbing things that shouldn't be climbed except if you had mechanical arms or able to shoot webs out of your wrists. But that was another story entirely. 

Whereas, Chet Karos, well, she could write a book on him and had just met him. 

Navigating a conversation with the bright-eyed enigma in room 709 was harder than she could believe. He was lucid, he was quick-witted and fully understanding of the rules of a civilized dialogue although the latter was soured by his inexpressible aura ofcreepiness. But what made it so hard, what made her throat tighten even at the memory of his calm voice, was the unshakeable sense that, as the two of them talked, he alone had the script. To talk to Karos was to get a sense that one was being steered, prodded along a predetermined path. Controlled. And it was not in Kat's nature to enjoy being controlled, not one bit. 

From a psyche that seemed made to control to one that had turned so massively passive was a mental jump, but Kat made it nonetheless as she slammed on the indicator and zipped up a bus lane across a busy intersection. 

Ottowell...thinking about him made her nauseous. All she wanted to do was get him out of there. It wasn't a place for the doctor and his creations. The actuators brimmed with life, brimmed with intelligence and ability whilst Otto was a quiet ball of genius and a bit of snide amusement. 

But now, both had been apparently destroyed; ripped up by people who believed him a bad thing. She couldn't understand it, really, and if she hadn't had years upon years of schooling, she would have broken him out the moment she knew it was him. And to even think he was someone else was completely amazing, the man had been so strong in his own way, his own little mental battle and social battles had changed him into something else, something no one else could attain, and to even _think_ to mistake that something for someone else was preposterous, and only showed Kat how terribly wrong Otto was for an insane asylum. 

Otto was saner then anyone would ever know. If anything, half of New York should have been thrown in that nuthouse for merely thinking he wasn't. 

Andhow had he gotten in there to begin with? Was it right after they'd lost touch, or had he only been in there for a few weeks, or what..she couldn't tell. She couldn't fathom how he'd manage to get himself drugged to hell and the tentacles disabled as they were. He was just smarter then that, and even if he wasn't, the tentacles would clearly help with that one. 

_Unless._

There _was_ an unless, and it was a bad one. It was a hulking, unpleasant unless so big that it deserved its own zip code. 

_Of course, on an intrinsic level, we ARE one and the same. If I get hurt, they experience discomfort. If I get angry, they getdispleased. And things get broken._

Those words echoed in her head as she barely ran through the yellow light, which was more of a red-orange then an actual yellow. Oh well. No cops around. Kat had heard those words from him, a long time ago, in a place that hung in her memory rather well, sort of like a large wad of glue on a surface meant to be pristine. 

"And if you went crazy, Otto?" Kat murmured to herself, fingers tapping idly on the steering wheel as she carved up a furniture removal van with impressive accuracy. 

Only humans went crazy. But machines broke, and computers malfunctioned. Andto be honestshe knew better than anyone that the A.I personality that governed the smart arms wasn't exactly the most stable creation in history. Oh, yes, it was balanced, all right. As balanced as certain tower located in a certain Italian city. 

So, if for whatever reason, Otto had let go of reality of his own accord, if something terrible that she couldn't even guess at as yet had pushed him over the edge, then technically there was every chance that the intelligence that shared his mind would just go straight over with him. It was simple to theorize that he would have been easy to catch, if that happened. 

And if that _had _happened, then all this was pointless. If that _had _happened, Otto Octavius belonged in that celltentacles and all. 

A few more horn honks told her that she really, really, needed to start paying attention to the road. Luckily, she was also just about home. Pulling into the parking lot and into the apartment was a sort of lost on her, deep in thought about her friend and his condition and this new girl she was going to talk to, and how little she knew about the girl. Her words formed in her mind as she nearly ran down the hallway and pulled out the key to her apartment. 

Slamming the door to her apartment open and closed, Kat sunk down into her fluffy computer chair and stared at the screen before moving the mouse and causing the screen to flicker on in a haze of blue and Windows. With several quick clicks she was at and a quick search revealed (thankfully) only one Escher Griffin living in New York City. 

This was for Otto, for the tentacle-boy, for the tentacles. She wouldn't let him live like that, and if he was doomed to do so, then she'd find out why. 

She picked up the phone and read the number off the website, pressing the buttons on the pad then hearing the slow, repetitive sound of the dial tone. Finally it stopped, and there was a girl's voice, one that Kat estimated could not be any older then when Katarina Morrigan herself had first met Otto Octavius and started the strangest friendship in existence. 

_"Hello?"_

"Is this Escher Griffin? If so, well, I have one hell of a story for you. Well, you don't know me, but my name is Katarina Morrigan, I'm a criminal psychologist and I work at an asylum. I have a certain connection with a certain doctor that has more then two arms there, and it is not a good thing. I need your help." 


	4. Exchanges

Crimson ink dripped slowly onto the canvas that had been set up leaning against the apartment wall. The surface of the canvas was distressed; the half-completed image on it distressing, an abstract, writhing design that had been monochrome before she'd decided to lay into it with the ink. 

The phone clamped between her shoulder and ear, Escher Griffin let the loaded brush continue to spatter the board, moving her right hand slightly to try and aim the drips. She was going for spontaneous', but she seemed to be getting messy'. There was ink on the painting, sure, but there was more on the papers that covered the floor, the wall around the canvas, and, inexplicably, on the ceiling directly above it. 

And then there was Escher herself, whose clothes and hands looked like she had managed to survive the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then checked into the Bates Motel. A particularly large patch on the neck of her grey Eagles shirt gave the impression that someone had cut her jugular without her noticing. Given the circumstances, it was lucky that the colour of the ink blended quite pleasingly with the colour of her hair, which, salvaged from a disastrous dreadlock operation of the year before, was shoulder-length, spikily layered, and aubergine. This style gave her a vaguely Shetland pony-esque look, especially since she hadn't quite outgrown her teenage build (or lack of) ending up at a slight, speedway-metabolism'd 5 foot 2. Her freckles had faded, her braces were history, but her wordiness remained. Mouthy kids had a tendency to become cautious, soft-spoken adults. With Escher, the system seemed to have slipped a little. 

She was an art student, and she was currentlydoing art. Absorbed in her painting, she had heard maybe a third of the words that had crackled down the line. 

"Yeah...this is Escher Griffin speaking..." she said, vaguely, flicking the brush a little too hard and feeling a sudden series of tiny cold tickles across her face. The surprise of this snapped her out of it, bringing the missing details of what she had just heard falling into her head like a bag of bricks. 

"Uh, I'm sorry...what?" she said, slowly, picking up the bottle of ink and reaching out with her free hand to excavate the phone from under a stack of sketches on the desk. It had been acting up since she'd managed to spill a half-bottle of turpentine on it a couple of weeks ago. With this in mind, she shook her head and continued. "It's a bad lineI, hah, thought you just said more than two arms'." 

_"Yeah." _the voice on the other end was female, terse in nature, and very, very unexpected in content, _"Try six."_

The bottle of ink made a rather pretty pattern as it hit the floor, a spreading flower of red across the newspaper. The young woman hardly noticed it, her mouth gaping in a silent yawp like a landed fish. 

Six 

About four year and a half years had passed since Escher Griffin had last had any contact with Doctor Otto Octavius, the man who had once saved her life. Their first meeting, now nearly six years ago, had led her into what had turned out to be the strangest, most dangerous, most exhilarating few days she had ever experienced. Her memories of them were vivid, no less so now, when she hadn't heard from him in a little over five years. Some things were difficult to forget. 

Like Kat, she had grown used to the fact that, for a large proportion of people in the city, her tentacled friend existed solely to be maligned. She had also learned, very quickly, that once the combined might of New York journalism found out to what extent she had been involved with "Doc Ock", their No.1 paper-selling punch bag, they weren't about to leave her in peace in a hurry. A few times she'd grown so sick of the media frenzy aftermath that she had caught herself wishing that she'd never met him at all. A very, very, _very _few times, however- Escher was easily aggravated, especially when reporters followed her home or grilled her friends or, once, in a splendid violation of her constitutional rights, tapped her phonebut she was also loyal as hell. 

In any case, she had dealt with enough phone calls from strangers alluding to the doctor in some way to be suspicious by default, right off the bat. "Who did you say you worked for?" she said, warily, her inky finger hovering over the disconnect button. 

_"Uh...I work in the asylum off 28th. Under one Doctor John Mereii." _The voice sounded slightly wrong-footed, and genuine enough. However, it wasn't the tone that grabbed Escher's attention this time. 

_"_An asylum?" she repeated, incomprehension switch-backing her voice. _What the hell would he have to do with_She rubbed her nose with her free hand, somehow getting both inkier in the process, "...But...you know something about Doctor Octavius?" A cautious kind of enthusiasm was creeping over her, injecting her voice with a careful keenness as she said, "Do you...do you know if he's okay?" 

The voice of the woman who had introduced herself as "Katarina Morrigan" was dryness incarnate in response. _"Okay by whose standards? Miss Griffin, do you know the term catatonic?"_

Escher blinked. The Miss Griffin' sounded inexpressibly weird to her, only a week past her twentieth birthday and still undeniably a teenager inside her head. "That'sbad, right?" she guessed. 

_"It's the scientific name for what we psychologist people call a vegetable'."_

If there had been any chair in the vicinity that wasn't covered with sheets of newspaper or art supplies, Escher would doubtless have dropped into it. As it was, she had to settle for leaning against the wall, coherence practically slammed out of her by shock. 

_"Do you ever watch those movies where you have people in rubber rooms in straitjackets?" _continued the voice, in the tone of one trying to describe something horrible as brusquely as possible in an attempt to make it less painful to say._ "Imagine that." _A pause._ "Plus tentacles."_

It was no good. The wall was just not going to do. Escher shoved some paper aside with her foot and sat down on the floor, her legs folding under her. This wasinsane. The man _she_ knew justwell, he just wouldn't have let something like that happen to him. He just _wouldn't. _

She brought up a mental image of Doctor Octavius as she remembered him, and tried with all of her formidable imagination to apply it to the kind of picture that this woman was describing. It was like trying to imagine that humans evolved from bologna. 

"But...but...I-I mean, I haven't heard from him in, like, years...but he was fine last time I..." Escher trailed off. Another thought had just struck her. She knew very little about mental illness in general, and even less about the profession of psychology in particular, but a nasty little ray of comprehension pierced the clouds nevertheless as she remembered that, according to what this woman had said, she was presumably in charge' of Doctor Octavius at her asylumplace. Escher had always been bad at maths, which probably accounted for her knack for adding two and two and getting five, "Wait" she said, slowly. "A psychologist, huh?" Her mossy eyes narrowed. "_What did you do to him?'"_

An impatient snort on the other end made the line crackle._ "Miss GriffinEscher, if I mayif I had done something to him, why in hell would I be calling you? Do you think I like to run up my phone bills on being sadistic?"_

"You tell me!" snapped Escher, getting up again, her New Rocks scuffing a black streak on the boards as she started to pace. Truth be told, she felt the need to get angry at someone in response to the shattering news, and this psychologist' with the somewhat sarcastic voice was the only person within yelling distance. "All I know, is that when I last saw Doctor Octavius, he was perfectly normal-" Abruptly, she stopped, the pacing as well as the yelling, "Um...well" she trailed, deflating unhappily, "that isas normal as..." 

_"as normal as he could be."_

Silently, not trusting her own voice, the young woman nodded, the fingers of her left hand fiddling with the hem of her shirt. A snide little inner voice was murmuring; _yes, of course, that's the catch, isn't it? Remember seeing him so close to the edge? Not to mention so far gone -due to a certain little invention- that the edge didn't even apply any more? Normal isn't an applicable term._

Mentally she shook herself, tuning back in to reality. In her ear, Katarina was still talking. 

_"And the last time I heard from him, he was fine"' _she said._ "Until I got hired here and was told I might recognize a subject.' And I think you know as well as I do that Otto is far from insane."_

"I...I'm sorry." Escher turned back to the canvas, staring at the puddle of ink that was still spreading from the bottle that lay on its side on the floor. The bright pool was starting to run hazardously close to the edge of the newspaper, the seeping flood making it look like the floor was bleeding, _a la_ Amityville. "I...you can probably...this is sort of a shock." _To put it mildly._

On the floor, the pool continued its happy little bid for freedom, and Escher eyed it with growing urgency. This was her mother's apartment, which meant that a lot of things came free. The cleaning deposit wasn't one of them. "Um...would you mind hanging on for a sec?" she said, eventually. "I have major ink leakage." She balanced the receiver on top of the canvas and started to gather up the soaked papers, crumpling them automatically while her brain raced. 

_"...ink leakage?" _said the phone from its perch, just about audibly. She dodged out of the large, open-plan living area room and stuffed the papers into the kitchen bin, pausing to screw the top back onto what was left of the ink. 

"Yeah...I was working on something when you rang," she said, picking up the phone again, and regarding the canvas. It glistened unpleasantly at her. "But it'll dry. Eventually." 

_"I see..." _said the voice. Amusement, hinted that familiar dry sarcasm. "_Anyway...wellthis is going to soundvery...criminal of me...but...I need someone else to tell me if he belongs there." _

Escher frowned at the phone. The last part of that had come out in a rush, and a rather guilty rush at that. The confident-analyst tone had slipped a bit, too. Coming across anyone that shared her opinion of Doctor Octavius was not something that she was used to at all but in this voice, under the professionalism, Escher got the feeling that this person actually cared. She took a deep breath. "Well... Katarina, was it?" 

_"I prefer Kat."_

"Sure, okay... well... Kat... if you think it'll help him, I'd be more than happy to..." She dry-swallowed. "Although I, um, really don't like hospital-ish places.." 

It wasn't a phobia, not exactly. Phobias were generally irrational fears, and Escher felt that she had every reason for her dislike. What with one thing and another, she'd been in enough enforced waste-of-time counselling' sessions in icky-wallpapered clinic rooms to last her two lifetimes. After her ordeal', a lot of experts in the field of various juvenile trauma-related disorders had found her interesting' enough to convince her concerned mother that she had needed' them. Bunny ear phrases like these were no fun when they were being applied to you, especially when in the same sentence as tridazine' and twice daily'. 

"I'm sure I'll be able to handle it..." she said, eventually, and even managed to summon a short, shaky laugh. "I mean, how bad can he be?" 

Kat's voice snapped back, flat and deadly serious. "_He didn't know what the things attached to his back were. Does that explain the severity of the situation?"_

The grin stayed where it was, however, the rest of Escher's face sort of slid away from it. She stared, unseeing, at her half-finished painting. It was abstract, full of shapes and shadows and vague twining stripes. At a certain angle, if you knew where to look, there were tentacles there. 

Another thought occurred to her. 

"Uh...speaking of which...wouldn't those things on his back' be trying to sort of...help?" She remembered the ruthless force with which Otto's smart arms protected their host, the lengths to which they would go to preserve his life. And once- several times, in fact- they had saved hers. 

_As long as my existence endures, they will never tire._

Surely, surely, they would never let him get into such a situation. She knew that they were probably incredibly persuasive, and that their distrust of people in general matched and excelled Otto's at the height of his misanthropybut surely, she thought, if they sensed him losing it, they would try to find him some help? 

_"If those things on his back were alive and well, I'm sure they would. Did you study the spinal ridge? Ever seen the charred spot at the very top?"_

Escher felt relieved. Finally, something she knew. "Yeah, where the inhibitor chip thingie went. He told me about it." 

Kat sounded a little impressed. "_Rightwell, I suspect...I can't be sure...but I think each actuator separately has been placed with a chip similar to that, except much, much stronger."_

"...So he can't hear them?" Escher ran a hand through her bangs, the silver claddagh ring on one finger snagging in the purple strands. "At all?" 

_"I don't think they're functioning at all. They don't move, and their eyelights aren't glowing. Not in the faintest."_

"Hell," she said, quietly, "Isn't there anything you can do?" 

_"Well, I can't just let him out." _There was a hint of frustration there, enough for Escher to guess that this was exactly what Kat Morrigan wanted to do,_ "It's my job to make sure people in there are supposed to be in there. I don't know much about Otto's condition. If he really is catatonic, then he belongs there...but...I don't knowSo that's where you come in. Second opinion. I'm going to find out what medication he's on tomorrow and do more research on his condition. By then, I'll know if he is in there because he's mad or he's mad because he's in there. Get what I'm saying?'_

Escher sighed, "I wish I didn't...but...yes." 

_"I'll have to pick you up, as you need my clearance to get in. I'm thinking day after tomorrow. When are you open?"_

"Umm..." Escher checked her timetable. This didn't take long- her timetable consisted of a series of scattered Post-Its, tacked in an exploding pattern across the far wall. One caught her eye, its blotchy marker lettering yelling MISS LFE DRWING + DIE THURS 900AM. 

"I'll skip life drawing," she said, "I'll be home." 

"_Is 10:30 good?"_

"Fine." And then, tucking the phone under her chin; "Is there anything I should bring?" 

There was a pause, presumably as Kat thought. "_Anything that would mean something to him." _she said, eventually. 

Escher looked around the organized chaos of her apartment, an idea knocking timidly on the door of her forebrain. "I'll have a look." 

_"Excellent," _Kat's voice was brisk, professional again._ "Where's your apartment?...If you have one."_

"64th...corner of 3rd...It's a big grey brick apartment building, you can't miss it. I'm in 12, top floor, just take the lift and buzz." 

_"Alright. I'll explain it to you further when I get there." _A pause, then, thoughtfully;_ "Also...have you ever heard anything that sounds like Past time and present time all meet together in future time and all future is irredeemable'Or something like that, anyway?"_

"Ummm..." Escher wrinkled her nose. She was about to answer in the negative when, somewhere in the dusty filing system of her mind, a card waved. 

_Footfalls echo in memory_

"WaitThat really sounds familiar." Her head turned to the corner, where a tall black-shelved bookcase stood. Hersomewhat eclectictastes had stacked it with a bizarre range of literature, from Shakespeare to Stephen King, Nietzsche to Jhonen Vasquez. "It's poetry, I think." 

_"Any idea what sort?"_

"Hang on...I've got an anthology." She did, and according to Sod's Law it was right underneath everything else, half hidden on the bottom shelf by a ridiculously large dictionary of idioms and, inexplicably, a box of cornflakes. By the time she had managed to extract it, leaf through it, and find what she was looking for, nearly ten minutes had passed and the splatters on her canvas had dulled to the sullen red of an open wound. 

"Here...yeah, I knew I knew it..." With the book balanced in the crook of her arm, she ran her finger across the heavy text, reading aloud with the phone still squinched against her ear. Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.' Is that it?" 

_"That's exactly it." _said Kat, immediately._ "Who wrote that?"_

"Uhmit's by Eliot. T.S Eliot." Shutting the book created a sinus-invading powder-puff cloud of dust. "Uhhckghwhy? Where did you hear it?" 

There was a brief silence. _"Ottohad this...this spasm. And suddenlyhe was himself, and he rattled it off. Verbatim."_

"That's crazy." said Escher, without thinking, then winced. _Open mouth, insert foot. _"I meanstrange." 

_"It's very crazy." _Kat's voice was dry again, with a touch of despondency._ "And please, prepare yourself for it. If you knew him like I did...well..."_

"I knew him pretty well." said Escher, somewhat defensively. The more Kat told her about this condition', the more a sense of foreboding gathered over her. She was now entirely certain that this visit wasn't going to be enjoyable "And I knew he wasn't crazy." 

There was a sigh. _"If you knew him for who he was, then, if you want me to be blunt about it, seeing him now is pretty gut-wrenching."_

but what did "enjoyable" have to do with anything? Her own needs weren't the issue, here. 

"Well, frankly," she said, resolutely, "If there's anything I can do by being there, I think my gut can deal." 

_"Exactly," _It was possibly her imagination, but Escher thought she could detect a touch of relief in the older girl's voice. Relief, possibly, that she wasn't going to be squeamish (and shallow) enough to bail and leave Kat to deal with this on her own. 

"...Good luck with your...research, Kat." she said. 

"_It's not the research I'm concerned about." _The reply was tinged with worry._ "Good luck with your...whatever you're doing with that ink."_

An unexpected laugh escaped from Escher at this, a little too shrill to be much to do with humour. "Hah! Sorry...it's not funny...it's just that, before you rang, all I was worried about was finishing my...ink whatever...and where my cat's got to...and college tomorrow...normal, boring stuff. And then-" A hand flicked out, describing the path of a diving missile "-neeeeeeeeeowwkrshhh, _you_ ring, and, well" Another memory hit her, this time of being bored out of her skull in a boring summer job and being told to bring some boring book down from the seventh floor. She grinned a small, nervy grin. 

_"I was worried about keeping my job before this." _There seemed to be the faintest of smiles in Kat's voice, too. 

"Thursday, then." said Escher. 

_"Absolutely positively."_

Click. 

Kat placed the phone on the hook and let out a long sigh. Escher had understood. And she had said she'd come with. That was a success. And she hadn't sounded like a bad person who might try and betray her or Otto either. This was a success. The ink leakage.she didn't know that one. 

But anyway, there was still stuff to be done. She looked around her apartment and walked to a drawer, pulling out the second cabinet and digging to the back of it. The drawer was filled with everything that was completely miscellaneous key chains, keys, little pieces of paper with small things to never forget on them, receipts, even a piece of leather that had come from Otto's old coat. Her stomach twisted at the sight of it and reminded her again of what he was like now and what he _should _be, and told her she was doing the right thing by doing this. But besides that, she reached into the very, very back and pulled out three photo albums out of many. On one of them was scribbled, "HS", fond memories of high school times with her old friends, Jake and Michelle in high school, and various other things. It was filled to the brim and more, of course, but that wasn't the point. 

The second was labelled "College", memories of days with Halley and Mae (who she'd never forgiven after that day) and all her other friends Jessi, Terra, Mike, the entire gang of idiots. There were pictures of term papers and projects and her classes, pictures of teachers all with little quotes and doodles and dates and what have you. This one also proving useless, she took the third and looked at the front, which was labelled only with two interlocking O's, something similar to the infinity symbol or a horizontal eight. 

She smiled a little smile to herself and opened it. This one was filled with pictures of the tentacle-boy. Most of them had been taken while he was asleep and with permission from his tentacles, so they contained mostly sad emotions on his face and closed eyes. A few of them were of the tentacles specifically. 

These pictures were different, she knew, pictures that held more thoughts then one could imagine, thoughts she remembered amazingly clearly. Some of them, she knew what she was doing, what she was wearing and what day it was, even without looking at the date on the picture. 

A very select few were of Otto's face. Those that were burned with the life of Otto Octavius, burned with a furious passion to survive that had overcome odds that she couldn't even try to imagine. Odds that, no matter what happened, he had always dealt with; and no matter what it had been that he was dealing with, or how come, he was always good. And she did more then respect that- she admired it. 

Despite anything, Otto had become an idol of sorts to her during that time, and the time they'd had no communication. She'd admired his will to live, to live _his_ way, to make things right and to try and deal with what could not be righted. She'd taken these pictures, and hopefully they'd bring some memory. 

Hopefully. 

But nownow this, this creature that had taken over the doctor's body, this creature of evil and horror and despair, this creature who bore only one name, a name she didn't want to speak, didn't want to hear. To speak it. She couldn't believe that he was truly insane. That would never happen, and her, Otto, the tentacles, and Escher all knew it, somehow or other, in some subconscious state. For considering what Octavius had got through and gotten out almost perfectly (almost), nothing should so hard to deal with. 

She couldn't take all of them that much was clear. She picked out five ones that she remembered. One was a full open shot of a tentacle in all its open-clawed mechanical glory, its eye glowing magnificently and the rest of the arm curling around it. The second was a picture of the sleeping Otto, his face a dead, hurt expression, the four tentacles extending off the photo. The third, a full front shot of Otto Octavius and the mechanical actuators, glare included. She'd made him pose very specifically for this picture. And she was very, very fond of it. The fourth, a picture taken by Halley, was Kat clinging on Otto's back, both the man and the tentacles all giving her a glare that clearly spoke of disembowelment in the near future. Lastly was her favourite, no doubt. 

The three (four?) of them were in this one, due to the glories of time-delay photography. In the middle was Otto, of course, in the new coat that had just been bought for him, and on either side, Kat and Halley hugging him very tightly. Otto had an expression that read shoot me now', whereas the four tentacles were all curled around the three of them in a sort of tentacle hug, though she doubted they'd meant to do that. This one dropped her stomach (again) as she thought of the limp and dead tentacles that were now attached to the lifeless doctor. 

She tucked the three of them into her bag and glanced up at the nearest clock. _11 alreadyI must have been ruffling for a damn lot longer then I thought._with a shrug, she opened the door to her miniscule room and changed into an outfit more suitable to sleep. She collapsed onto the bed and sighed, her thoughts before drifting into sleep landing on solely on what she intended to do the day after tomorrow. 

A long way across town, past blocks and parks and cooling, clearing streets, a light still shone in a window at the top of an imposingly tall grey apartment building on the corner of 64th and 3rd. Inside, the sporadic thumps, scrapes, and papery slithers suggested that it wasn't only Kat who had decided to go digging through her possessions that night. 

Escher locked the metal acrossbar of her small stepladder and sighed. Investigating her old folders had turned into sifting through an antique (read collapsing) filing cabinet of papers had turned into excavating the stacks of documents that she'd stored underneath practically every item of furniture she owned that was raised off the floor more than a few millimetres. She'd found an interesting stick, a very very old TV license bill, and a peanut butter sandwich, but not what she was looking for. Now, at ten to midnight, it was the pile of stuff that she could see on top of the bookshelf that looked promising. 

She mounted the ladder and gathered the pile towards her, groping blindly over the top of the shelf in case there was anything that had slipped down the back. At the trickiest moment of her stretch, her hand came up against something soft, warm, and furry, and the shock very nearly made her fall off the ladder altogether. 

"Mrrr?" 

Two pumpkin-coloured eyes regarded her reproachfully from over the edge of the shelf. Meeting them, Escher recovered quickly from her start, dumping the pile of paper on the floor and reaching up towards the sleek tabby shape that poised, paused, and then jumped silently down onto the top rung of the stepladder. 

"Jellie, you little monster, you nearly scared me to death!" 

"Mmmmmmwwwwwerrrrr." agreed Jellie, aka Jellylorum, sole other resident (and to all intents and purposes co-owner) of Escher Griffin's home. Descending another rung, she suffered herself to be briefly stroked, then dropped to the floor and padded pointedly towards the kitchen, turning back towards her owner with the beseeching look of one who fully understands the function of a can opener, but has no opposable thumbs. 

"You'll have to wait." Escher said to her pet. "I'm busy." She bent to pick up the papers, and then looked up again as another thought struck her. "And it's not like you can't feed yourself, eitherunless all those mice I keep finding under the couch died of old age. Which I doubt." 

The cat gave her an insulted look. 

Escher sifted through the papers, her hopes of finding the one thing she needed concealed amongst them quickly fading as she realized they were just old junk mail. It was part of her personality to hoard stuff like a global shortage was on the horizon- a global shortage of _everything. _The only thing that kept her apartment in its perpetually messy, friendly, and habitable state was the whirlwind throw-outs that she perpetrated every few monthsand she was getting very much afraid that this was exactly what her target had fallen prey to. 

There weren't many more places to check. The place was fairly large, but another thing which stopped Escher's life descending into chaos was the fact that she _knew _where things wereHowever out-of-hand things looked, she could have found maybe 95 percent of her possessions in under three minutes, because no matter how much stuff buried them, she _knew _where they were Escher's apartment was messy, but her brain was neat. 

She dropped the last piece of mail to the floor (CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE WON ONE OF 9,0000 PRESTIGIOUS PRIZES!) and rubbed a palm against her forehead, still as a statue in a moment of utter frustration. She watched vaguely as, across the room, Jellie gave up hope of anything edible happening anytime soon and started to tread round and round on a few crumpled sheets of scrap paper that had been dumped on the couch, preparing to settle. 

that had been dumped on the couch 

she hadn't dumped _anything _on the couch. 

Escher crossed the floor in an instant, twitching the pages out from under her pet rather like a magician pulling a tablecloth out from under the plates- the paper was removed, but the cat stayed stationary. A quick glance told her that the pages must have slipped from under the stack she'd removed from the top of the closet, right at the start of her search nearly two hours ago, fluttering onto the couch. Chances are, she would never have noticed them. 

"Thanks, Jellie." 

Two pieces of blank paper scythed over her shoulder as she flipped through them, stopping dead on the third. She looked at it for a moment, and then started to smile, flipping the side that had started the smile over to regard the black sharpie letters that were still visible on the creased, grubby paper. 

_This Book Belongs to Escher G. _

If found, pleeeeeeeze return to 17 Lyndstrom Heights, 156 72nd St, M, NYC. 

Thank you! 

Absently, Escher sat down on the couch, reaching out to tickle her pet behind the ear. "You'd've liked him, Jellie-o." she murmured, as the cat purred like a lawnmower. "Maybe you'll get to meet him, huh? This Kat lady says he's gone crazybut he can't really be all that bad, can he?" She looked at the other side of the page again, running a finger down the ragged edge where her scared fourteen-year-old self had torn it from her sketchbook and given it to the man that it portrayed as a peace offering. A sacrifice, even, to save the rest of her work. 

"I'll find out when I see him, anyway, Jellie-o." 

How little had she known about him, back then? How much more did she know now? She'd lost contact with him, and all she could do now was try to remember what she could. Luckily, this was a lot, and it was vivid as it could possibly be. It was as if the page was a visual trigger, bringing her memories of Otto Octavius piling back on her all at once. 

And it was a lot easier to hold on to those memories now, without Kat Morrigan's worried words in her ear. 

"Nohe can't be all that bad." she repeated, and although she was still addressing her pet, the words were for her own benefit. Jellylorum _mrrp'_d, curled up, and fell asleep, leaving Escher to realise that she, of all people, should probably have recognised before now that spending her evenings on her own talking to something that wasn't human was maybe not the healthiest thing to be doing. 

"I _really _need to get out more." 

An obnoxious, constant, and very, very annoying buzzing woke Miss Morrigan up the next day at about 700 AM. She rolled over and glared at the clock, smacking it several times. Smacking it didn't help, so she pushed it off the miniscule dresser and turned the other way. The clock was stubborn, however, and even face down over a pile of papers and Kat faced the other way, the cursed electronic still managed to make itself heard.

"I HATE you." she grumbled, picking up the clock and glaring at it, the surface scratched from repetitive abuse. "I hate you, you vile, vicious little machine of death and hell." With another curse, she turned the thing up and put it back on the dresser, stood up, and sulked to her closet.

Clad in only a pair of boxers and a long Yankee shirt, she opened the closet and pulled out a pair of nice pants and a good shirt on a hanger. Throwing it on the bed and not caring much how much or how little it wrinkled, she put the hanger on the top of the door and stepped into her shower. This was the reason she didn't gain any weight she wouldn't fit in said shower.  
An hour later she exited the apartment, pictures included, washed, dressed, and looked all nice and pretty and ready to deal with her sadness again.

Laying out her plans for the day mentally while driving gained more honking horns. Ah, well, she fit well in the chaos of New York City like no one else could drive. At least she wasn't shaving, talking on her cell phone and a hot coffee between her legs, because she'd seen that before. Needless to say, she was driving better then the vast majority of New Yorkers.

Pulling into the parking lot and exiting with briefcase in hand, the woman stepped inside and hopped into the elevator. She was so consumed in her thoughts that she wasn't really sure how she'd gotten to Mereii's office. She was just there.

"Good morning, Miss Morrigan," said Dr. Mereii, his face hidden behind the Daily Bugle. "Are you going to make more progress today?"

If Kat wasn't on the verge of exhaustion then and there, she would have punched the man. "I can't make any progress on a vegetable, John, I've told you that already."

"You will." He put down the newspaper and eyed her. "Or, I'll show you how to, at least."

_I'm sure you pump him with more drugs then Karos has correct predictions, _thought Kat, a smirk hinting on her lips. "No, that's all right. Thank you, though."

Kat watched John from where she stood, studying him intently. She had no idea how she was going to keep this job if she didn't make any "progress", and she needed to keep this job, so she needed to make "progress".

"Johnwhat medication is Mister Octavius on?" she asked him evenly.

The man's eyes flickered up at her behind his slim-framed glasses. He eyed her purple contacts and thought for a few moments before opening his mouth and replying flatly, "That's classified."

There were a few moments of silence in which Katarina Morrigan felt she was going to maul John Mereii.

"I'm his psychologist, Dr. Mereii, that's the sort of thing I need to know so I can make progress. After all, you wanted PROGRESS didn't you?" Her voice had fallen to a low hiss, maybe even a faint growl.

The man eyed her again and shrugged. "Kat, if you're going to keep exploding like that—"

"I'm NOT EXPLODING! YOU'RE JUST NOT GIVING ME WHAT I NEED TO DO ANYTHING!"

John watched her with a smug smile.

"I NEED INFORMATION! I NEED TIME, AND I NEED A BRAIN! GODDAMNIT, JOHN, I'M NOT A GODDAMN MIRACLE WORKER!"

".not exploding?" Mereii asked with a lift of an eyebrow and that smirk. "You're screaming. You're exploding."

There were a few more moments of silence in which Katarina Morrigan felt she was going to maul John Mereii. 

".I'm going to work now," she said, her teeth gritted and her voice filled with barely contained rage. With a nod, she turned on her heel and all but stormed away.

She fumbled with the card around her neck as she slid it through the slot and sulked into the rubber room, glaring down at its patient. But it was hard -impossible- for her to be mad at Otto, especially in his current state. All the rage that had been boiling her blood instantly melted into pity at the sight of the man. "Otto?"

He made a little noise. At least he had realized her presence.

"Do you remember me?"

_From before. _she thought. _ANY before. From however many damn years ago. Or at least, for God's sake, from yesterday. _

A vague shake of the head was all the reply she got, neither assent nor negative in its neutral movement-for-the-sake-of-movement twitch. The shake stirred his hair slightly, the russet shade of it appearing darker than she remembered, her eyes tricked by the glare of the polar walls. "I remember something about a girl. and and me," he mumbled, although he didn't look up.

"Here" She dropped the file of stuff and pulled out a picture, the one of him sleeping, "Do you recognize this?"

He lifted his head slowly, the weight clearly uncomfortable on his bound shoulders, and eyed it, "Sleeping?" he guessed in a voice that sounded like a two-year old solving algebra.

"Who is it?" she asked him softly, mentally praying.

"I don't know" He looked at the picture for several moments before his head fell back in front of his chest, apparently succumbing to the forces of gravity. "Who?"

"It's you," she whispered, putting the picture on the ground so that Otto didn't have to raise his head to look at it. "It's you, a long time ago."

His face knitted together tightly, trying to focus. "I don't remember.. this."

She pulled out the second, the one of the tentacle. "What's this?"

The answer was more than she'd expected, but far, far less than she'd hoped. "It's it's a thing that doesn't talk anymore. It goes into me."

"Go on."

"It's a, a thing. A tentacle a metal tentacle.' There was a pause, and then, with suddenly crystal-clear enunciation; "It's a mechanical actuator." From the puzzled look that shifted across his face at that point, it was clear to Kat that he had absolutely no idea of what this particular spark of enlightenment meant. "A thing." he repeated, a moment later 

just before the spark became an explosion. 

"And, and i-it used to talk but it didn't and they gagged it and I miss it and I need to hear it and I need it and I want it and I have to have it and I need it and I must get it and you have to get it for me and I would do anything for it and and. and" Abruptly the flood of words stopped, just as if someone had thrown a switch and plunged the inside of his head back into darkness. Which, Kat guessed, wasn't far from the truth.

He'd blanked. Kat cursed mentally, but forced herself to wait, patiently, for the thousand-yard stare to roam back into contact range. This time, when it did, her patience was rewarded after a fashion- the lift of his head was quicker, coupled with a shadow of something which might have been frustration. Yes, he'd blanked- but this time, he almost _knew _that he had.

"I was saying something important and I forgot it," he said, slowly. 

She nodded silently. He frowned and shook his head, sighing. "I don't remember things anymore I don't remember ever remembering." 

The psychologist pulled out the picture of Otto in all his glory tentacles, himself, coat, and death glare included. She placed it in front of the tied-up doctor and watched him carefully. 

Looking at the picture with what was presumably intense focus for someone whose mind was probably operating at about ten percent of its usual capacity; Otto knitted his brows together loosely as he examined it. Kat looked thoughtful for a moment as she watched him closely. Up until now, her meeting with him had been filled with surplus emotion, pushing everything else she could think of away. Her mind had been filled with escape plans and the days they had spent together, the vast majority involving one or both of them running from the police. Now, with a soft smile at the dazed Otto, she spoke in a hushed, quiet tone; "They never did like you, did they, tentacle-boy" 

Afterwards, Kat could only reason that it was the sound of the familiar nickname that called down this particular bolt out of the blue. 

"That's me." He spoke in a breathy, desperate voice. "That's me, before they did this to me and" 

She looked sharply up at him, her eyes filling with amazement, leaning closer to him to catch every word. 

"That's me before this and. and and onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight nine! Nine! andand TEN!" He almost screamed this last one, startling the girl. "Ten comes after nine! Eleventwelvethirteenfourteenfifteensixteen... seven seventeen!" His voice rose even more as he spoke, gaining strength, life, vigour. Kat watched him raptly, her eyes hopeful and the first smile she'd smiled since last night coming onto her face. He continued fast, forcing the words out, focusing on his surroundings, on _her,_ as if he remembered. 

As if. 

"Seventeen eighteen nineteen." His head drooped a little bit, and with it Kat's hopes. "Nineteen nineteen." 

A long, sad sigh emanated from the figure of Katarina Morrigan as she let herself fall onto her side in the stark-white rubber room. She laid there, her eyes closed and her face etched with despair, the last other two pictures falling from her grasp. 

"Wake up" she whispered bitterly. "Wake... the hell up this isn't you... this isn't where you should be and and I need... I need to get you the hell out of here" The corners of her eyes glistened with unshed tears. "Wake the hell UP, DAMN YOU!" She burst up and shouted at him, the tears beginning to fall. "I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! GET OUT! GET _OUT! _GET _OUT OF MY FRIEND'S HEAD!" _

Otto just watched her with a dull, placid expression. _Yes, ladies and gents, Octavius has left the building. _She might as well have been shouting at a brick wall for all the reaction she was getting. 

Kat glared viciously at the brain-dead doctor, biting her lip as tears trickled. "God DAMNIT WAKE _UP!_" 

"Why are you shouting?" he asked her blurrily, his head cocked to the side, "Have I done something wrong?" 

If the room hadn't been soundproof, expletives would have echoed down the hallway and through the asylum. 

Octavius watched her with a calm, mellow expression, clearly unthreatened. If anything, his face was confused. 

"I I must have... have done something wrong, right?" 

Kat opened her mouth to scream again when she heard a pressurized _hisssss_ of the door. She stood back up straight and didn't turn. To let Mereii see her tears was to give herself a pink slip. 

"Kat, I'm going out for lunch. I'll be out for an hour or two. It's 1:30 now, okay? Check back to me at five, and I'll dismiss you." 

Her bleached ringlets bounced in a nod. There was a faint _squeak _followed by the _hisssss_ of the door closing. Kat turned and glared at the door, her reddened eyes narrowed. A slightly evil smile crept upon her face as she opened the door and slid out, closing it behind her. 

Sitting down at Doctor Mereii's computer, she eyed the machine warily before moving the mouse and flicking the monitor into life. There was no screensaver password, but she guessed that was the only the first of the possible obstacles. Searching through his files, she found a locked folder and smiled at it. As trite as it sounded, this one was labelled in capitals; CLASSIFIED. 

"Classified my ASS, John." 

She chuckled to herself and clicked on it, and it, as expected, prompted her for a password. She regarded the empty white rectangle with the flashing black line in deep thought, tapping her lip for a second. With a little nod, she typed in _John Mereii. _

INVALID PASSWORD. PLEASE REENTER. 

_Damn._ She clicked the okay box and it reverted back to the evil white rectangle. There were a few more seconds of thought before she typed in _twenty-eight street. _

INVALID PASSWORD. PLEASE REENTER. 

"Stupid bastard" she growled, aiming this remark more towards the owner of the computer than the computer itself. "How the hell does he expect me to make progress without-" The metaphorical light bulb went off. "-HAH!" 

She typed in _Progress. _

The folder successfully opened. Her speed-reading eyes scanning its contents, she glanced at the various folders; all named very simply by someone who obviously had no expectation that anyone would be reading them save himself. 

FUNDING, EMAIL, PATIENTS. 

"Hah hah hah hah _hah"_ She giggled contentedly like a child and clicked into the one named PATIENTS. 

Each one, again, was named. _Very organized,_ she thought with a grin, eyeing each folder again. The mouse hovered over _Toren, Michael,_ and _Karos, Chet, _for a second before flying across to the one named _Octavius, Otto._

There were three things in the folder. One of them was called _information._ The other two were neatly labelled _medication_ and _email._ Her curiosity piqued on _email_, she opened it and a clicked a random document. As her eyes scanned the screen, her mouth steadily dropped. 

_.god. _

The email read as follows 

Dear John, 

It was a pleasure speaking to you last night. I simply cannot believe my luck upon discovering you and your willingness to volunteer those in your care. I wanted to thank you for advance before I lay out my ideas and suggestions for you and the subjects that you have offered so graciously. The FDA has commented time and time again that testing upon human subjects is illegal and morally questionable, but I am happy to see that you hold a different opinion. Again, I have to extend my most gracious thanks to you for letting me do this. I trust you can decide for yourself which of your patients would be most appropriate for each medication. Also, be sure to try different amounts on each one, as with many of our products we have no information on which to fix this variable. With the wide range of products I am enclosing, I am sure you can find exactly what works best for each condition. 

Whatever money that my company makes for selling and marketing, you will receive one quarter of the profits plus the additional funding we are sending you now. I hope this is acceptable to you and I look forward to our next conference. 

Again, my thanks, 

Trevor 

"He's." She clicked the email closed and tried another one. 

And this one was almost exactly the same. 

"This isn't even." Opening both of them, she promptly went to file, then print, and the papers begin to slide out of his color laser printer quickly. She closed the email folder and opened the one labelled _medicine_, now afraid, downright _sick _with dread in fact, of what Otto would be on. 

"Rodedineumm, what? atorvastatine _what_ on earth? .paroxetineprednisone A, prednisone B, and, what do you know, prednisone Cnever head of thator this one_this _one__" Another light bulb dropped on her. "Wait...a second...these areoh. Oh God." 

Her face pale in the cathode-glare of the screen, Kat counted breathlessly. 

Onetwelve. He's on _twelvedrugs,"_ Completely astounded, Kat leaned back in the expensive leather chair and ran a hand over her face. No way could John Mereii, her boss, be incapable of doing something so horrifying to any of the people he was supposed to be _treating_. 

...but apparently he was. 

She glanced over the file again as it printed out, determination knotting her forehead. With a few keystrokes, the copy of Otto's medication instruction list that would be sent to the staff servers with the evening update was reduced. Very severely. To a blank page. She didn't think that Karen would think to question it before passing it on to the orderlies- she seemed a nice person, but as a secretary, the woman was a liability. And if she _did _notice, well, looks like the file got a little buggy. Worse things happen in cyberspace. 

Maybe this would helphell, it _had _to. 

Closing the file again, a sick feeling eating at her stomach, she guessed- hoped, at least- that there was no more to know about Otto. This was surely why he was like he was, because this man, this _shithead_, was testing DRUGS on him. How _dare_ that little 

"Scumbag" she growled, closing the folder. She clicked into Karos', eyeing its contents. Here were the same folders that she'd seen in Otto's, and with a few more clicks, more illegal drug testing was exposed. More illegal funding shipped straight into Mereii's personal accounts. More horrifying things that were happening to the people here, and god, she didn't even want to SEE what Mereii had Star on. 

Looking through each file with a quick pace, she printed out everything she saw. There was barely anything legal, and she was piecing together this little puzzle quickly. 

Everything started with Otto's appearance on the records. Sure, there were a few minor misdemeanours before that date (if you could call skimming and testing dodgy chemicals on human beings _minor) _but when Octavius, Otto' arrived, which, Kat noted, was very nearly a year ago, the floodgates opened. It was like her friend had been an instant focus for Mereii's callous, profiteering abuse, almost as if he had been waiting, expecting him to turn up. What John Mereii had against Otto she couldn't possibly fathom, but whatever it was, it was bad. And the rest of the place, not to mention the other residents, was getting hit by the surplus anger from it as well. 

And on top of everything else, a few glances at the asylum's budget had shown that yes, it was huge, but 53 and 10 did not add up to one hundred. The other 37 of the money, she discovered with a victorious grin, was being used for various things which probably weren't going to be used for the good of the patients (like anything was). Such as a brand new BMW, and a flat screen, high definition, plasma TV. Mereii wasn't just being an asshole; he was evidently trying to enjoy it as much as was possible while he was at it. 

The time slid by unnoticed to as she looked through each and every file. And a very, very large percentage of them were about unapproved drugs or unknown funding or embezzlement. Or all three. 

She yawned a bit and collected the stack that had come out of his printer. Shoving it in her briefcase and closing it the best she could, trying to hide the massive amounts of paper in it, she stood up. She glanced over to the clock and tapped her chin. 

"4:00!" she asked in amazement. Mereii had been out for almost two and a half hours. She had to get out of here and she had to do it now. 

All this would be enough for a very, very, _very_ nice lawsuit. 

She collected the files and closed the folders, scooting out of the office. With these stashed away in her briefcase, she opened the door to Otto's room and looked down at him. Placing a hand on his shoulder, she gave him a soft smile, "Help is on the way." 

He just looked up at her with those sad, forlorn eyes. 

There was no more progress to be made on Otto for the moment. She guessed that, earlier, she'd been witness to the biggest flash of awareness that he'd had in monthsand now, as his glazed, introverted stare suggested, he was paying for it, whatever remained of his intelligence exhausted by the effort. So she sat in a corner of the room and leaned back, ruffling through the files. Some order was, well, in order. 

With this done, she glanced at her barely-used watch, which read a nice, even 4:30. Perhaps John had seen fit to mosey back from his THREE HOUR lunch break. She picked up the briefcase and smiled at Otto, then whisked out. 

A little elatedness bounced in her system as she skipped into Mereii's office. She had no idea when he'd gotten back, but as per usual, there he was hidden behind the standard Daily Bugle. 

"You're dismissed." 

"Thank you, Doctor Mereii." She smiled at him and closed the door as she exited, practically running down the hallway and into the car park. In truth, she felt like an examinee who has managed to get away with stealing the answer paper from the teacher's desk. If her Focus had been open-top, it was conceivable that she would have vaulted into it. She was in that kind of a mood. 

Instead, she had to settle for doing the standard New York driver thing to relieve the nervous bounciness that assailed her. Twenty miles above speed limit and squeaking brakes, that is. 

Finally home, she rushed over to her phone and dialled Escher's number, "Escher? Doing anything? Good. I'm coming over." 

_"Sure, come over, wh—" _

Click. 

The slamming of the receiver on the phone and the slamming of the door were almost synchronized as Katarina Morrigan disappeared out of her apartment again, briefcase and paper bearing address in hand. 

Escher lowered the droning receiver from her ear and blinked. 

"Okay" she replied to the dead line, then looked up and surveyed the chaos around her. She'd been far too tired to make any attempt at straightening anything up the previous night. Then, this morning, she'd woken up about quarter of an hour before she was due for registration in the main lecture hall of her college, halfway across the city. As a result, tidying of any sort had failed to happen. If Kat was on her way, she was going to have to start clearing up right now 

Jellie materialized at her side, and promptly dug needly claws into her leg. 

"Wrrrrrll!" 

after she'd fed her cat. 


	5. Almost

Maybe twenty or so minutes later, Kat was riding an elevator. Up to an apartment to a girl that she'd never met, and talked to on the phone once. And here she was, standing in front of the apartment, pressing the buzzer in front and watching the door nervously. 

"Yeah?" came the voice on the other side of the door, muffled by the wood. 

"Escher? It's Kat." She looked down at her fingernails a little nervously and gave herself a quick look-over in the dirty mirror. Bleach-blond bun, still in standard working clothes. She might as well have been a door-to-door salesman or something. 

The buzzer grille crackled like a bad megaphone as it delivered Escher's reply. "Hiya. Push the door, watch out for the boxes." There was the click of a bolt. 

Kat slid open the door and peeked inside at the pseudo-mess that looked like it had tried to be cleaned but didn't. She stepped inside and closed said door behind her, eyeing Escher silently. As Kat took her first look at Escher, the younger girl was likewise busy sizing up Kat. One hand crept to the other, apparently automatically, wrapping around a finger and clicking it. "...Hi." 

"It's nice to meet you," Kat said smoothly, recovering. "I... am speaking to Escher Griffin, right? I'm not making a complete idiot of myself, yet, anyway?" Another eyeing took place. "..You have purple paint on your nose." 

At this Escher smiled, a shade less nervously. "I know... it won't shift. Yeah. I'm Escher. Welcome to my apartment... it's quite safe, as long as you don't touch anything, I can guarantee nothing will collapse on you." 

"A pleasure, I'm Kat. Sorry about the hanging up in the middle of your question... I barely missed the traffic." 

The art student held out a hand that was very nearly clean and now only slightly red-spotted, and they shook. 

Kat stepped a little further in and glanced around, a smirk faintly appearing on her lips. "Well, your organization is uh... really organized. The entire piles of crap scattered everywhere thing looks very, very neat." 

"It's a system," said Escher, on the defensive. 

"I'm sure it is," replied Kat, checking to make sure her hand displayed no red paint itself. "It must be an artist thing. I know other people who're artists, and they all have the most impressive organizational methods." 

Escher padded off through the wreckage of what underneath, was probably a very spacious realtor's dream, a hand wavering over various piles in search of the right one. "Yeah, us right-brainers are all alike... case in point... here.' 

She picked up a piece of paper and held it out. "Will this do, do you think?" 

Kat eyed the picture thoughtfully. "Not a bad drawing, you must be a pretty decent artist... as for the rest of the wording... I'm sure that has some significance to him from you..." 

Escher grinned again. "It was how he found out where I lived, I think. As for the actual sketch, it never got finished... I was about halfway through THAT particular piece of life drawing before... something grabbed my attention." 

Kat lifted an eyebrow at the artist. "Really, what was that?" 

"A certain really, really angry doctor," said Escher. She looked perfectly happy at the recollection, and Kat realised that this girl was naturally optimistic enough to have partially blanked most of the bad news. To emphasize this, her next question was; "Anyway, how come you decided to come over now? Is he better?" 

The psychologist turned and smiled a too-sweet smile at Escher. "No..." she started, "But he IS on twelve untested and unsanctioned medications." Her voice dripped sarcasm. "Isn't that just GREAT?" 

This time, she got to see Escher's shocked-fish yawp first hand. The younger girl's hands flicked together, and the snapping restarted, putting Kat's teeth on edge. "...He's... WHAT?" she said, faintly, eventually, "But... surely... isn't that, like... illegal?" 

Another sarcastic smile and layer upon layer of cynicism emanated from Kat, "Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. As is embezzlement and funding under-the-table. And taking three hour lunch breaks. And... there's more then that, but I'm not going to bother to rattle it off." 

Escher, as per usual, was now completely confused, and the thing known as the clue' and she were now so completely separated that there were clear grounds for divorce. She shoofed a bunch of cartridge paper off the just-visible couch and sat down, heavily. "I... ah... oh." 

A pause, and then she looked up. "Three hour lunch breaks?" 

"...yeah. My boss is really not a nice guy, I've discovered. See..." She tossed the briefcase to the spot on the couch next to Escher and unlocked it. "That pile of papers is all illegal drug testing, embezzlement, illegal funds or all three put together." 

Escher picked up the top piece of paper and looked at it, holding it gingerly as if it might suddenly turn into a frog. "Wait... so... your boss is breaking a bunch of laws...and Doctor Octavius is involved how?" 

"See..." Kat tapped her lip contemplatively. "Are you one of those people who are against drug testing on animals or whatnot?" 

"Definitely," said Escher, immediately and with passion. 

"Well, my lawbreaking boss is breaking laws on a certain Octopus." 

After a moment, Kat became aware of a silence on the other side of the sheet of paper. A hot, powder-keg sort of silence. She lowered the paper. Comprehension had landed. Escher now looked primed and ready to explode. And her first words echoed Kat's first thoughts when she had seen Otto Octavius in that room, "We have to get him OUT of there." 

Placing the paper down upon the stack, Kat looked up at Escher, her expression falling slightly. "Yes but, wait." 

Escher was fuming, her thin artists' fingers balling up the hem of her stripy sweater. "Wait? Wait? I thought you said this guy's using...Otto...like some kind of lab monkey. We have to get him OUT. The sooner the better..." 

She looked up at Kat. "...right?" 

Kat eyed Escher professionally. "Sit down, and let me finish my damn story. college students..." She rolled her eyes. "Always jumping to conclusions." 

The girl with the purple hair gave Kat a half-hearted attempt at a glare, but sat down nevertheless. 

"That's what I thought." The psychologist eyed the college student before sitting down next to her. "I was about your age when I met Otto, y'know. Good times." 

She leaned back on the couch and tapped the scar above her eye. "Yes, yes, good times." 

Escher gave her a sharp look. "Did they give you that?" She said they' automatically, Kat noticed, not he'. 

"Oh, no," she replied automatically, casually, as if talking about this certain _them_ was nothing out of the ordinary. "I got it from hitting my head on the corner of a hospital table, saving them." After a moment, she felt she needed to add for the sake of said _them; _"They did, however, sew it up for me." 

The girl nodded, then laughed suddenly. "You know, you're the only other person I've ever met...apart from Spiderman... who I've ever been able to talk like this to. It... takes a bit of adjustment, I can tell you." 

"Yeah, It's a little creepy for me too, but it's my job to talk creepy, so, I do a better job of disguising it." 

Escher gave her another scalpel look, which announced pointedly that Mr. Impatience was still in the house. "Which is why I'm actually about to listen to you when you tell me why we aren't currently MOUNTING UP." 

With a sigh, Kat cocked her head to the side. "Did you ever stop to consider perhaps he belongs there?" she asked, her voice quiet again. 

"Of course not," said Escher, too quickly. Kat, who had seen the flicker in her eyes before she had spoken, waited. 

"...He's sane. You know he's sane." Another pause. Then, as Kat expected, the girl dealt with the nasty nag of uncertainty she was feeling by getting annoyed. "Well, what do YOU think, Miss Psychologist?" 

Kat crossed her arms over her chest, and gave the art student a sideways glance. "Don't tell me you never thought he was a bit off in the head. Because if you do, you're lying to me and I know it. Because even I did, at some points. And even if he wasn't, you knew his connection with the tentacles, isn't it possible..." and she pulled the hair tie out of her bun and twirled a ringlet, then looked up at Escher and narrowed her eyes, "that something could have happened to them, and affected him secondly?" 

Escher shrugged. "When someone is yelling at you about how things like conscience and emotions are, ummm, glorified diseases', it's easy to think that they might be a bit off in the head'." 

"Never heard that one before. But regardless, if he is insane, then it's probably possible to get Mereii arrested, but leave Otto in there, which, as much as it pains me to say and think, is where he may belong." 

"But, surely... it's these weird drug things, isn't it?" The girl blinked, recalling her own experiences with medication, all of which had involved mild soporific sedatives. "I mean, is he like, all drowsy?" 

"Drowsy wouldn't begin to describe it, Escher. I've taken him off all his medications, so tomorrow, if he's sane, we'll know." 

Escher's next question surprised her. "...Is that safe?" 

Kat looked thoughtful for a moment. "No less dangerous then testing drugs on him, I'd think." She looked at the artist for a moment of silent observation. "I don't think you're understanding the difference between catatonic and drowsy. I'm not talking about sleepy here, Escher, I'm talking about one step next to a coma, or the same." A pause. "The reason I think it's the medication is that had it been a catatonic state, he would not have such spasms." 

Escher's expression was one of someone who badly needs a dictionary, preferably a medical one. "Catatonic. Spasm." 

"Catatonic, it's when you become a vegetable. I hope you know what a coma victim looks like?" 

"Yes...like in Psycho." 

Kat opened her mouth to reply, and stopped as something furry brushed against her leg. "No, you idiot," she grumbled, clearly not used of talking to people who did not speak her language. "A coma is- I didn't know you had a cat." 

"Mrrrrr." 

"Mrrrrr to you too." She patted the feline's head briefly, then back to Escher. "It's when you stare at the wall and think nothing, sort of like..." She stopped talking, her hands dropped to her side in a moment of complete, total stillness and silence, to the extent of creepy. 

Escher watched her, wide-eyed. "Doctor Octavius...like that?" she said, eventually. "I...well, I'd like to say I can't imagine it. But I've got kind of a vivid imagination." She shuddered. "And please stop that, you look dead." 

Snapping out of it, Kat nodded. "Yeah, just like that. Tentacles too, and that's the point. He looks just like that. except more so." 

Another shudder. "It HAS to be the stuff he's on," said the younger girl, apparently to convince herself. "It HAS to be." 

"There's a good chance it is. More then half, I'd say, but again, we can't be sure." 

"Well..." Escher shook her head, fingers once again twisting at the hem of her sweater. "Whatever it is...however bad it is... if it's like you say..." 

"Just keep thinking worse, you'll get the idea." Kat forced a smile, then looked away, the muscles in her face twitching back to a frown, "I hope it's the medication" she said softly, worry finally seeping into her voice. "I really, really do," She bit her lip for a moment and blinked, then shook her head. "Gah...I'm getting sappy." 

Escher gave her a timorous smile. "Well, look at it like this... whatever it is... if he's as far out of it as you say, at least he's not suffering or anything, right?" 

"I have no idea." 

_One _

after three? 

The green and yellow machine of doom and hell screeched it's call at 7:00, as per usual. This time, however, Kat was smarter with it and gave it a well-aimed smack, hitting a conveniently spaced snooze button. Ten more minutes of respite for her. 

Upon reflection, the girl noticed that ten minutes was not as much as she'd like. The obnoxious mechanical shouting of the alarm clock was nothing like the cool and complex scritching the actuators spoke with. 

_Oh yeah._she thought to herself, finally sitting up_, Picking up Escher today to see Otto._

With a few muttered curses and another few meek prayers, Kat stepped into the shower and let the hot water hit her body as she leaned against the tile. It was strikingly cold against her bare skin coated with hot water. "Please, let this work" she pleaded to whatever would listen, "Please" 

She turned the shower off and glanced at the clock, and of course, was horrifically late. The neon-red letters gleamed at her unhappily, bearing an uncomfortable 9:30. 

"Yeahhail the lateness" she muttered, changing and fixing herself up as she grabbed the keys and strolled down the hall, heading to her call. Luckily, she was late and the traffic was minimal by New York City standards. Stopping down at Escher's complex, she took the elevator and stairs to the top floor and knocked on the door. The door creaked open, revealing Escher Griffin in all her purple-haired and stripy-coated glory. 

"C'mon. I know it's early. Let's just go before something horrible happens, like traffic starts again." 

Escher just glared up at her, the lines of sleep clearly showing on her face. However much the girl had got, it was clearly not enough. Rolling her eyes, Kat ushered the girl down and to her car, in which Escher finally looked up again. 

"Not bad." 

"My mom bought it for me when I got my bachelor's. Nice thing, but can't say I wouldn't go for a BMW." 

The two of them slid into the seats, Kat's eyes on the road. In the eerie silence, Katarina heard a strange noise; a sort of noise that she sure _hoped_ wasn't her car. 

_Snap. Crik. Snap. Crackle. _

At the red light, Kat turned to look at Escher, then down at her twitchy hands. "Quit cracking the knuckles."

"Nervous habit." 

Kat rolled her eyes and turned back on the road, 

_Snap. Crick. Snap. _

"ESCHER!" 

She nearly missed the curb as she pulled in to the spot in front of the building as she shouted at the other girl. With a set of jerky and irritated movements, she opened the door and got out, motioning for the artist to as well. 

"Just play along with whatever happens. And remember, Otto is _not_ a good guy." 

Rolling her eyes, Escher nodded. "I know _all_ about it." 

The clock ticked loudly in the silence of John Mereii's office. The doctor himself was seated behind his desk, immersed in the Bugle's morning crossword. Tick, scribble, tick, scribble, cross out, frown, tick. 

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK 

The door opened silently well-oiled hinges. The stark light was interrupted by one figure, trailed close being by a smaller one. 

"Dr. Mereii? I just wanted to let you know that I considered your thoughts a little more last night and I was thinking that maybe you had the correct thinking and not me, I guess I think too much of myself... ...so, on that note, I just wanted to check and make sure you knew I was bringing another person to look at Mr. Octavius, she might have an impact upon him or him upon her..." 

Mereii blinked and put the paper down. "Kat. Good morning. Well, I'm glad you've decided to fix your attitude." He shifted his bespectacled gaze from Kat's bright smile to the girl at her side. 

"And this is...?" 

"This is Escher Griffin, John, who was abducted by Mr. Octavius earlier, I was thinking she would help me today," Kat gave Escher a shut up and smile' poke in the back. 

Dr. Mereii gave the stripy-sweatered Exhibit A a long look. "And exactly how do you theorize that this young lady is going to help you achieve progress, hm?" 

"Well, she had more experience with him then I did," lied Kat smoothly. "So I thought she could maybe translate some of the behaviour he's displayed lately, better then I." 

"Hn," Mereii commented, eyeing Escher through his wire-rimmed glasses. He eyed the artist for a long moment before finally saying, rather then asking, "You were the one who was kidnapped about five years ago." 

Escher nodded, "Yes, sir." 

Finally standing up and pushing his chair out, he walked around the desk in a series of fluid movements similar to a panther and looked down at her from an angle that made him seem a hell of a lot taller to the college student, "Aren't you afraid to see your captor again?" 

Escher looked up at Mereii, and to Kat's surprise she did look afraid... very. She dry-swallowed and her nervy fingers promised to do some damage to her sweater hem. "... Um... well... yes, Dr. Mereii... I suppose you could say I'm pretty much terrified. But from what Kat tells me, I think I might be able to help her find out what she needs to know from that..." her voice shook slightly, "freak... so I'm ready to do my best. Sir." 

Mereii smiled down at Escher, the first real genuine smile that Kat had seen on him since they'd first met. "You could learn a thing or two from her, Katarina. Anyway..." the man continued, turning back and sitting back down at his Italian leather chair. "Here's a card..." He opened a drawer and held a key-card out to Escher. "To get in." 

Escher took it, her own smile small and full of trauma. "Thank you, Doctor." 

"You're quite welcome. Katarina," He looked up at the fake-blond, who flashed her own smile and lifted an eyebrow, "You can go." 

Kat nodded briefly and ushered Escher out, closing the door. The two of them began a brisk pace down the hallway as Kat looked down at Escher, "Are you really that scared, or were you just doing a really good job bullshitting?" 

The younger girl's expression was twitching, as if she was trying not to laugh. "Kat, I have had to play along with more analysts than that creep had diplomas on his walls. What do you think?" 

"Ah, good, you even got me worried for a moment, and I've had eight and a half years of schooling to figure out people," she replied. "You're very, very good at it." 

Escher grinned, dryly. "Thank you, ma'am. Besides, I'm kind of a little insulted that you'd believe for a second that I could use that word to describe Doctor Octavius and mean it." 

"Yeah, that's why I doubted. If you haven't used something like that," She pressed the seventh floor button as the elevator began to climb, "you would have seriously gotten me." 

As the car rose, Escher leaned against the wall and examined the card Mereii had given her. "So, according to this, my name is "Natalie Roper" and I'm a "sanitization engineer". I take it the security in this place doesn't allow for guest passes." 

"Oh yes," Kat replied as the elevator opened with a ding as the two of them stepped out, "You know, the criminally insane patients get visitors all the time." 

She stopped for a moment in front of 708. "Do you mind seeing my other two crazies?" 

"No..." said Escher, still reading her pass, "In fact, it'd probably serve as a good tutorial." 

"Hardly, because the three of them I deal with are radically different." She zipped her card through the slot and opened the door, steeping in softly."Star?" 

The dirty-blond mop near the back-right corner of the room lifted a little and turned, showing one jaded blue eye. "Hihi, Kitty!" 

Kat took a couple of steps inside the room, a move which gave Escher the option of following her, or having the weighted door slam in her face. She chose the former, and that was how the trouble started. 

"Hey, Star," replied Kat, moving over to him and sitting down. "How are you?" 

Star scooted himself to face Kat. "Like I am always, I miss them so much and I want them back," he replied, frowning a little more. His eyes refocused on Escher, who was almost directly behind the psychologist. They then shifted to the spot next to her. At first, his expression remained the same, but his weary baby-blues blinked and he scowled, an expression which didn't seem to fit his mellow face. 

"Stealer!" he shouted, now definitely glaring at Escher, or perhaps more appropriately, the space next to her. 

"Huh?" said Escher, taking a step back. 

Kat frowned in response, also taking a step back. "What are you talking about, Star? She's not a Stealer." 

"She's a stealer, Kitty!" the boy responded vehemently. "She has a shadow and I hate it and I can see it even though she thinks she can hide it from me and them! She told me that I don't need them and she's listening to it and that's bad and I want her to get out of here! Make her get out of here, Kitty! It's right there!" He pointed to right next to her. Kat suddenly realized why he was classified with schizophrenia. "Right _there_! Too close to me! If it gets any closer it could hurt me and them and take them away even worse then it has now!" He was trying to shift himself to either attack her or scoot away from her, but Kat couldn't tell which it was. 

"I'm gone," said the girl, hurriedly, pushing on the door. "But I'm not a...whatever!" she shot, as it closed behind her. 

Star glared at the door and looked over at Kat, "She had a stealer" He muttered darkly. 

"She's not a stealer, Star;" she responded again, still frowning. "What makes her a stealer?" 

"She had a stealer with her, so she's a stealer too," Star told her, as if this was a well known fact. "If you have a stealer then you are a stealer. But you're not a stealer, Kitty. You don't have one, not like her. You actually have one of them following you. You're so lucky." 

Whatever was following her could wait, as there were other issues at the moment. Star, she knew, wasn't changing anytime soon. "StarI'm going to see what I can do about getting her away from you, okay?" 

He nodded, beaming again, "Thank you, kitty, you're the best best thingy besides them!" 

Internally awwww'-ing, Kat stood up and ruffled his hair, then stepped out, shutting the door behind her, "Well, I've never seen him do _that _before." 

Meanwhile, Escher leaned on the sterile white of the corridor wall, breathing out heavily. Her first encounter with a truly insane person, and it had not gone well. Walking a little way down the corridor, she looked at her own reflection in the glass observation panel of cell 709 and tried to work out what exactly the man with the blue eyes had seen that had made him hate her on instinct. She couldn't see anything herself, but then, her eyes weren't insane. Just mildly neurotic. 

Then she focused again, and suddenly found herself staring right through the glass and into the room beyond. 

Kat looked around. Escher was standing a little way away, staring through the window of cell 709. From as much of her expression as Kat could make out, she looked as if she wanted to turn away but couldn't quite do so, "Kat..." she murmured, "who's that?" 

Striding over to Escher, Kat placed a hand on her shoulder, replying nonchalantly, "That's Chet. He sees the future." 

"It looks like he's seeing right through my head and out the other side," said Escher, faintly. 

"It looks a lot creepier when you're not looking through a thick bazillion-times reinforced glass." 

She slid her card through the door and stepped in, beckoning in Escher. 

"Hello, Katarina. Hello, Escher." 

This time, the younger girl looked like she definitely wanted to stay outside. "Um...hi...Chet...how exactly did-" 

"I know your name?" Kat noted dully that he was standing this time, and from the marks on the floor, he had been pacing before Escher had arrived, "Why, you told me, of course." 

Escher looked at Kat imploringly, as if praying for a thread to grab on to. "He can see the future?" 

Kat nodded, "Apparently, considering every prediction he's made since I've known him has been correct, and that's what he says. I can't think of any other explanation." 

Karos, however, strode up to Escher and looked down at her, giving her a faint smile that had more then faint creepiness, "Your name is Escher Griffin, and you're going to help save Otto Octavius along with Katarina," He said calmly, turning away and striding to the end of the room, "Well," He started again, hooking Escher's eyes for the second time, "I wouldn't want to keep you waiting." 

Escher looked at him, carefully. "Yes. I suppose I tell you that, too?" 

"Escher-" started Kat, warningly, but Karos merely returned the stare, leaning slightly against the padded wall. 

"That's right." 

"So..." continued the girl, slowly, as if working it out in her own head as she spoke, "what happens...if I _don't_?" 

The other girl bit her lip, "Escher, that's probably not the smartest question to ask..." 

She trailed off, as the silence stretched out to an unbearable length. Kat saw that the tall man's eyes had narrowed to dark, predatory slits. Finally, he shifted slightly; a movement that made both Kat and Escher take a step back, and repeated, slowly and deliberately: 

_"I WOULDN'T want to keep you WAITING."_

Every syllable was emphasised, each sound hit with almost painful precision. The words were sharp, as if each letter were filled with a dozen little razor-blades that shot out as he spoke. Kat watched Karos evenly, fear curling in her stomach. She had learned a few things about Chet Karos, and one of them was that this man did not scream when he was angry. And she could tell right now that he was furious. 

And as crazy as it sounded, she was scared of him at the moment, the two unnaturally-brilliant green lines that peered out from under thick eyelids, the familiar cocky and creepy smirk replaced by a flat line, a line that looked as if it were going to open and reveal a viper's fangs. 

"I think we're going to leave now." Escher said, carefully, and did so. Without turning around. 

"That sounds like a good idea, Escher," agreed Kat, who walked backwards and only turned at the last moment to open the door and close it behind them as they exited. 

"Well..." She started with a long sigh of a breath she didn't know she was holding, "Are you trying to get all my psychos rallied up?" 

"I'm sorry!" Escher's voice had gone up an octave, and it took her a sentence to get it back under control. "I...he...just got to me! I'm not exactly used to this kind of thing..." 

"Its fine, I'm sure you didn't _mean_ to be a stealer, but as far as asking Chet that, well you could have heeded my WARNING." 

She eyed Escher with a bit of a frown as they stopped in front of 712, "Well," Kat started with a bit of a sigh, "Are you ready to see Otto?" 

Escher gave herself a mental shake, trying to dislodge the residual effects of Star's dislike and Chet's creepiness. She dug into the inside pocket of her sweater, her hand coming back with a crumpled, many-times-folded piece of paper, which she held like it was some kind of talisman, "As I ever will be." 

Kat took a deep breath and slid her card through the slot, opening the reinforced door with a little bit of effort. She stepped inside and stepped smoothly over to Otto. Escher couldn't see her emotion as the psychologist sat down next to her old friend, "Otto?" 

To her unease, there was very little response. Possibly the head moved slightly, but it didn't lift, and there was no other sign that he'd even heard her. This was a long way from the recovery Kat had been hoping that the removal of the illicit medications would produce. In fact, this was very possibly the worst she'd seen him as yet, "Otto?" She asked again, quietly, placing a soft hand on his shoulder, "Otto, are you there?" 

At her touch, the shoulder tensed, and the head lifted, with all the speed of a glacier. The eyes this action brought up to hers were even cloudier than before, and Kat got the impression that, whatever he was looking at, it sure as hell wasn't her. 

Behind her, she heard Escher breathe out gently, volume and emotion of any kind slammed out of her voice by shock, leaving a dry whisper. "Oh...oh god...oh god... Oh god oh god. Christ." she added, evidently going for variety. 

Whatever professionalism eight and a half years of schooling had gotten Kat, it might have been nothing, for at that moment, Kat just fell backwards onto her rear and ran a hand over her face. Her expression was haunted, devastated, even. 

"Did I..." She asked in a soft whisper to the doctor quietly, her breath coming in shallow, silent whispers, "Do the...right thing for you, Otto?" 

At first she thought the sound was her imagination, a faint stutter of a noise just above her hearing threshold. She sat up, sharply, just in time to hear the stutter become a halting sentence, of sorts. 

"Thhhhhhhh...the...r-right...thing?" 

The hand over the woman's face relocated to her hair, running through the bleached curls. She hid her head behind the arm attached to the hand that was currently in her hair, whatever expression she bore hidden. 

Her voice was muffled but understandable, "The right thing...did I...did I help you?" 

The gaze dropped. "...help..." 

"I'm trying...I...am...I really...I don't know...I..." Her voice broke off, whatever energy she had had to use it apparently sapped. 

"Kat," said Escher, urgently 

With a deep sigh, Kat looked back up at the other girl's voice, her expression one of failure, "What is it, Escher?" she asked, the spunk that the artist had gotten to know her by gone. 

"Is there any point...I mean...can I try?" 

"Sure," she replied, standing and moving over, leaning on the wall. 

The younger girl padded forwards over the uneven floor and stopped, uncertainly, in front of the man who had once saved her life. She unfolded the sketch carefully between her hands and held it out. 

"Doctor Octavius...do you remember me? Do you remember this?" 

Kat's focus fell off Otto and Escher and came upon a lifeless tentacle next to her, and for a moment, whatever she felt for Otto funnelled into to rage at the small, friendly blue diode on the actuator. For another four moments, the shock of pressing it is seemed well worth the revival of the tentacle, but seeing Otto like this reminded her why she shouldn't. 

He looked up again, at the fragile paper and the pale, expectant face behind it. For a moment, his oblivious expression seemed to flicker. "...Diff...er...ent...?" 

Meanwhile, the psychologist eyed the dead actuator next to her, flashing back to the time when they'd destroyed two spoons for being tapped, and poked the cord tediously. It moved a bit, but only from the force of Kat's hand. Also, she noted it felt strangely light; the metal and mechanics in the tentacle had been terribly heavy when they'd been alive, another thing about them that terrified her, strangely enough. _Are they in pain?_ she wondered vaguely _What are they like now? Are they like him?_

Escher nodded, enthusiastically jumping at the opening, "Yeah, I guess I do look different..." the artist rambled on, hopefully. "My hair wasn't this colour last time, huh? And I had braces, thank God they're gone... and I was shorter...though not much shorter, apparently it's genetic...and...I...um...hello? Doctor Octavius?" She looked up at Kat, imploringly. "Kat? I think he's gone cata...thingie. Please say I didn't do that." 

"Catatonic," Kat corrected automatically, "No, you probably didn't." She looked at the covered tentacle thoughtfully for a moment, pressing her lips together, "Maybe...maybe..." She pushed herself off the wall and looked down at Otto, sitting next to Escher and looked the doctor, speaking clearly. 

She wasn't quite sure where her newest idea came from, but it was one of those things that simply popped into her mind as she was online and printing out TS Eliot's Burnt Norton. If knew it, maybe she could help him learn more, maybe more could go into more of what he was, so then she was memorizing it.and...it came to this. 

"Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable." 

It was as though, after so long shouting futilely from the far distance, she had suddenly picked up a hotline phone and spoken straight into Otto's ear. He gasped, body jolting forwards as if someone had shoved him from behind, and looked straight into Kat's face, and then from Kat to Escher. Seeing, yet somehow still blind to what he saw, he blinked suddenly-living eyes and said; "Footfalls echo in the memory down...the...passage that we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose garden..." There was a short silence, while the armies of confusion and memory fought for control. 

"The...rose..." he said again, but now there was a sense of slippage, of something falling away behind his eyes. Both Kat and Escher returned the stare, silently willing him on. 

"The rose garden..." Kat edged, watching Otto intently. Her fingers flicked for something her pocket, pulling out the picture of her, Kat, and Halley and showing it to the doctor. Otto stared at the photo, and then at the sketch, with the convoluted expression of a frustrated child who is trying to fit a spherical block into a square hole. Then... 

"...Rosie?" 

"Yes! Ros——" 

_ hisssssss..._

The door opened behind them both, "Katarina? Miss Griffin?" 

"SHIT!" Kat swore out loud, turning on the spot and opening her mouth for another spray of expletives, but at the sight of her boss, her mouth merely opened and closed, gaping, "Doctor Mereii, I uh...uhhh..." 

Escher moved surprisingly fast, swiftly docking between Mereii and the momentarily floundering Kat. "Dr. Mereii? I think there might be something wrong with this card you gave me. Kat had to use hers to get me in." She smiled, sweetly, flicking the card under her hand to hold it out to him, and incidentally giving the magnetic strip an invisible but rather nasty scratch with her nail as she did so. 

John smiled down at Escher, taking the card, "Sorry about that, I'll go get you a new one..." A faint glance up at Otto smoothed his expression over, "How is he? No problems or anything, I hope?" He looked at Kat for a half-second, then down to Escher, clearly trusting the artist's answer more so then the psychologist's, probably for the sheer point of Escher was "traumatized" by Otto, and Kat was his friend. 

The older girl took the opportunity to recover from this, "No problems at all, John." 

Taking her cue, Escher gave Kat's boss a convincingly baffled back-up nod. "Yeah, Kat's just been trying to get him to talk to me...he's all kind of spacey though." 

"That would explain the expletive..." Mereii replied, still a bit dubious. "You can finish the explanation after I get you a new pass. I'll be back in about five minutes." 

With this, he flashed a short smile to both girls and opened the door, letting it close behind him. Kat leaned against the wall, "BASTARD!" 

"That was either really really bad timing or scarily on-purpose good timing." said Escher, likewise leaning wearily on a wall, "and either way it sucked." 

"We were THIS CLOSE, Escher, this close." Kat squeezed her thumb and forefinger together, then looked down at Otto. 

The younger girl shook her head, refolding and unfolding the sketch between antsy fingers. "He's gone again, hasn't he?" 

She nodded, "Yeah, for the time being. But...I don't think he's really catatonic, what about you?" Kat looked up at the artist, folding the picture of the three of them away. 

The attempt at origami apparently not being stress-relieving enough, Escher's hands returned to their perpetual standby pastime. "I...I don't know. He said "Rosie", didn't he?" _Snap click_. "That definitely wasn't catatonic." 

"and if you KEEP CRACKING your KNUCKLES," Kat began vehemently glaring, "I will KICK your ARTSY **ASS**," Her sudden burst of expression made Escher's eyebrows lift and her hands hide in her pockets, away from each other. But as soon as this happened, Kat returned to her former slightly-defeated state, "No..." she finally agreed, still giving the girl a death gaze, "I think it's probably the isolation...lack of tentacles...medication...that's sent him like this...and our prodding has begin to awaken it.." 

Escher frowned. She was having to pick up the rudiments of psychology from scratch, and the effort was evidently making her overtaxed brain squeak. "So...what was all that poetry about?" 

"I have no idea, but he recalled it extensively the first time I saw him. I suppose it means something to him, something important...something...really important." She frowned. "And I don't know if it will work again, either." 

"Why not?" said the younger girl, now fiddling with the torn edge of the paper in her hand. "I mean, compared to before, that was an amazing response. Why wouldn't it work again?" 

"I think this is the worse I've ever seen him remiss. It would take nothing short of a tentacle to wake him up from this." 

She could have predicted what would happen. Escher's eyes flicked instantly to the nearest tentacle, to the sickly-friendly blue light on its collar. "We could maybe-" 

"Are you crazy! All we need is four tentacles, alive and well, being as they are, here, with just us two, alone, and him." She shook her head and eyed the diode herself, nevertheless. 

Anger, again, frustrated at that. "Well, what CAN we do, then?" 

"I don't KNOW, Escher!" Kat growled back, "I have NO idea. I have to do my bullshit report for John, either way, so unless we think of something now, I have towell...do it." 

Escher squinched the bridge of her nose, glancing back at the drifting and unreachable doctor with an agitated sigh. "Right now, the only thing I want to do is run over there and yell and shake him out of it." 

"Go ahead." 

Escher looked up, exasperated. "I was speaking hypothetically. It wouldn't work, would it?" 

"If it would have worked," replied her companion, "he would be making another fusion reactor already." 

"Assuming...assuming he _wants_ to wake up..." 

Kat shook her head over at Escher, "Why...wouldn't he? He..._can't_ be happy like this...can he?" 

"I'm not the psychologist." she replied. "I mean, I'm assuming Dr. Scary back there has been doing the same kind of stuff you've been doing with him, right?" 

Kat smirked faintly, "I have no idea. The illegal drug testing told me whatever it is, it's not good. And to be quite honest, I probably don't even want to know." 

Escher shuddered. "Neither do I." 

Standing up, the psychologist looked around, "I better get to that stupid goddamn report. I'll see you Saturday, alright? More studying for me on Friday, plus night courses and whatnot happens then too. C'mon, Escher." 

With a final glance behind her, Escher followed Kat from the room. After a silent walk and elevator ride, Kat stuck her head in Mereii's office, "Doctor Mereii? I'm going to get some lunch and drop Escher at home. I'll have the report for you a little later tonight, alright?" 

The rapid takatak of some document being hastily quitted on the computer screen that hid her employer's head made her grin, a singsong starting up unbidden in her mind_. I-know what-you're up-to..._

"Fine, Katarina," Mereii said, from behind his screen. Then he leaned sideways into view and gave her a carcinogenic smile. "I'm sure it'll make...interesting reading." 

"I'm sure it will," She forced the smile off her face as she said; "I look forward to your feedback." 

Kat smiled again and bowed her head before stepping out and closing the door, "Jerk..." she mumbled, stalking down the hallways with Escher in tow, pulling in the Focus out of the parking spot and down the city traffic. 


	6. Progress

Dr. Mereii tapped the top sheet of Kat's primary evaluation report with his pen, each strike getting slightly faster and more forceful. "Kat, do you remember the briefing I gave you when you first arrived?" 

Kat suddenly found herself wishing she was standing up, rather than sitting opposite her boss and his desk with its ostentatious mahogany sheen. She needed no formal training at all to appreciate that the atmosphere in the office was dangerous, and that Mereii's apparent calm was a tightrope with Christ knew what lurking below. 

"Yes" she said, tentatively. She knew very well that the report was a load of bull, but having spent some three hours that night piecing it together, she considered it carefully-worded, high-grade bull, designed to make Mereii believe she was making the "progress" he wanted. This had mostly involved justifying Otto's current state by means of various theories and explanations, all of which coincidentally happened to omit the fact that she had entirely removed his medication. 

Tap, tap, _tapTAP. _"I asked you, as I recall, to assess this man's mental situation, and to, heh, _harvest_ any information he might have that concerned his past actions. I also asked you, as I would ask any employee, to present me with a report." 

The bleak grey city scenery which was visible on the other side of the office window had never before looked so attractive to Kat's eyes. "Yes." 

Discarding the pen, Mereii leaned forwards, picking up the top page of the document before him between finger and thumb. "Thisis not a report, Miss Morrigan." 

Kat swallowed. _We have officially advanced to Defcom Five. Use of surnames compulsory. _

"I'mnot sure what you-" 

"This," her boss continued, as if she hadn't spoken, "is a word-processed, ten-page, footnoted, _alibi." _He skimmed through the pages, his calm visibly deteriorating with each flick. "Diminished responsibility''immense inner upheaval'Kat, are you analyzing this man, or absolvinghim?" 

"I-" 

"Katarina, I need hardly remind you that your position here is tenuous." Mereii practically growled, pushing her report aside. "I have no interest in whatever misguided preconceptions you may have concerning this _patient, _but if you had a shred of professional integrity you'd realize-" 

That did it. Kat was on her feet and yelling before she could quite work out how she'd got there. 

"Professional integrity! I'm doing everything I CAN, John! Up until two days ago, Otto was the least responsive patient I've ever _seen, _let alone had to interact with!" She snatched her report, almost shaking the pages in his face. "I'm lucky I even managed to get THIS much! I'd like to see _you _try-" 

John Mereii stood up. The sudden movement effectively silenced the young woman, whose rage subsided instantly, replaced by an indefinable dread. A feeling which was very definably connected to the new, calm, and above all _cold _expression that had entered the man's eyes. 

"Very well, then, Kat." he said. "I will." 

Kat had to practically run to keep up with Dr. Mereii as he strode down the deserted seventh-floor corridor. His eyes were turned resolutely to the front, and he was deaf to her carefully phrased (but increasingly urgent) queries concerning what exactly it was that he was about to do. Kat had a horribly good idea that it was something to do with the small glass bottle and syringe that her employer had obtained from the first-floor orderlies' station on the way up, and the notion was making her feel sick to her stomach. As they passed 708 and 9 without a pause, she made one last attempt. 

"Dr. Mereii, what are you-" 

She was cut off by the placid _beep _which announced that Mereii, John N' had been recognised by the key card system. Mereii turned finally to face her, his hand on the door panel, a shark's smile animating his face. 

"Think of this asa tutorial, Kat. Watch, and learn." 

_Hsssss._

Otto looked up as they entered. This in itself was a surprise, given his condition earlier that day, and Kat started to wonder whether this could possibly signal that some of the medication was starting to wear off. That his focus appeared to have something in the way of direction about it was another favourable hint. His perpetually lost expression hadn't lessened, however, and, from his position in the centre of the snared cords of his tentacles, he looked at Kat seemingly without recognition before turning his head to watch her employer. 

Mereii took the bottle from its container and examined the label. Kat guessed that whatever it contained, it was legal- Mereii wouldn't risk exposing his nasty little secret to her in this manner- but that didn't help the sick feeling that was still building up somewhere in her chest. 

"Youwere hereweren't you?" 

The question was so conventionally phrased that it took Kat a second to realise that it had been Otto who had spoken. The young woman started, turning from her study of Mereii and finding herself confronted by a pair of bewildered, nearly-aware hazel eyes. 

If she had been alone with him, she would have dropped down to his level in an instant and talked her heart out, anything to help him up those last few tiny steps to sanity. But she wasn't alone, and she knew that Dr. Mereii hadn't missed Otto's faltering question, although he ignored it as if he had. 

"Kat," he said, calmly, "I'll need to administer this injection. If you wouldn't mind just holding him still for a moment?" 

"Ummwell," said Kat, carefully, "He looks responsive enough as it is right now, John. I think-' 

"You are not paid to think, Kat." said Mereii, still smiling. Kat opened her mouth to reply that she damn well was, as it happened, but then thought better of it. Mereii's smile was of the sort that lies on tropical riverbanks waiting for unwary tourists. 

"In fact," he continued, "that's entirely the problem. You seem to have been labouring under the misapprehension that your goal lies in getting this patient to willingly respond to you." He removed the sterile cap from the syringe tip and punctured the seal of the bottle with it, drawing the fluid upwards with a practised twitch of his thumb. "The problem with that, of course, is that a mind like this has already deteriorated far beyond the point of useful response." 

"I disagree," said Kat, hotly. Mereii gave her an indulging, mentorish look that made her want to kick his teeth into next Tuesday. 

"I'm sure you do. Now, please give me the patient's arm." 

Kat would have been more than happy to oblige, at that moment, though not at all in the way her employee meant. She would have dearly loved to have given him all _six _of them, fully able and aware, and to have been able to sit back and watch to see which one would close around the bastard's throat first. Her feelings were amplified by the way in which Otto had stopped trying to focus on her or Mereii, and was now entirely occupied in watching the syringe in the man's hand. Clearly, the very sight of such a thing caused him unease, and it didn't take a genius to guess why. 

Dr. Mereii was still watching her closely, and Kat realised that there was no way out of this. She could either refuse, and be dismissed, losing her access to Otto and maybe even whatever chance she might have had to rescue him from this nightmare, or comply and hope that whatever Mereii had in mind (and in the syringe) wouldn't be too damaging. What choice did she have? 

None. 

Slowly, she knelt by Otto's side and loosened the catch on the side of his straitjacket, releasing the strap that kept his left sleeve bound to his right shoulder. As she lifted the arm, which was just as much of a dead weight as the mechanical ones at his back, she couldn't help touching his wrist through the cloth, and the wasted feel of it chilled her. 

She pulled the trailing white sleeve up over Otto's hand, trying to avoid his face. A sideways glance told her that yes, he was looking at her, and she could have sworn that there was a flicker of wounded betrayal in those now definitely worried eyes. Whether or not this was real or a fabrication of her guilty mind was uncertain, but it stung her to the core nevertheless. For a moment, she seriously considered getting up, decking Mereii with her clipboard, and just making a run for it. Then she looked down and saw what she had uncovered, and the thought vanished. 

Until about four inches after the wrist, Otto's left arm was more or less normal. Above this, however, it was a mess. In fact, it looked distinctly as if it had been attacked by a demented acupuncturist with a grudge. Needle tracks followed the lines of the main arteries, mapping them out like a join-the-dots picture, stratas of bruised or half-healed punctures that showed up starkly against his bloodless skin right up to the shoulder. They were perfectly normal, yes, if something that looked so atrocious could ever be called that. Competent injections tended to leave such marksbut there were just so _many _of them 

Her thoughts were interrupted as Mereii moved quickly to stoop alongside her, still busy tapping and testing the needle to remove any air bubbles. "Thank you." he said, briskly, and gave the instrument a last, appraising stare, entirely coincidentally holding it barely half a foot from Otto's mesmerized eyes. Kat bit her lip, and closed her own. 

Somehow, the fact that Otto made no sound made it worse. A few moments passed in silence, and then there was a shift in the air at her side as Mereii stood up to put the syringe back in the holdall. She opened her eyes, and occupied herself with re-covering and re-tethering the left arm. As she did so, she looked desperately up into Otto's face, trying with everything she had to somehow communicate her thoughts to him, just as the smart arms had done, mind to mind. _I'm so sorry, Otto, I had to let it happen, there was nothing else I could do. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm-_

"Kat." said Mereii, impatiently, from behind her. Turning, she stood up, trying to control her helpless rage enough to keep her expression blank as her employer flapped a hand to indicate that she should watch from the side. With a sinking heart, she noticed that Otto's eyes were already glazing over, taking on a feverish pall. Whatever it was that had just entered his system, it was clearly no ally of the progress she and Escher had made. 

Dr. Mereii rummaged efficiently through his briefcase, pulling out papers as he spoke. "Now, Mr. Octavius, we're going to do a little exercise, all right? Kat here tells me you've been having some problems with your memory. Is that right?" His voice was sing-song, condescending in the extreme. When there was no reply, he merely nodded and wrote carefully on a sheet of notepaper. 

"Patientto answersimple query." 

"Hey," said Kat, sharply, "he can sometimes, he just-" 

"Yes, Katarina?" Another too-bright smile. Kat stared back, sensing the danger. 

"-nothing." 

"Good. You have to realise, Kat, that although this man might have _been_ of above average intelligence, that has little to do with the mind we are assessing now." He raised an eyebrow, taking a pen out of his pocket protector. "Metaphorically speaking, whatever little remains of that intellect is trapped in there, pointlessly pushing at a mental door marked pull'. Rather an amusing picture, hmm?" 

Without waiting to see if Kat was likewise amused', Mereii turned back to Otto. He started to idly pace the padded floor, a few steps either way, shuffling through the papers in his hands. 

"Well, Mr. Octavius, I've taken the liberty of preparing a few visual aids for our session today. Let's see if we can jog your memory, hmm?" He turned to Kat, his voice switching back to its normal, chilly self as he held out a stack of what looked like photographs. "Keep these face down and hand them to me one by one." 

He resumed his pacing. "Do you know why you're here, Mr. Octavius?" 

This time, Otto's eyelids flickered slightly, and he managed a reply. "?" 

"Yes." said Mereii, bluntly. "You're ill. You're sick, and, more to the point, you're dangerous. Too dangerous, in fact, to be allowed anywhere near ordinary, healthy, _normal_ people. That's why you're here, and that's why people like Miss Morrigan here are paid to visit you and pretend to be interested in your deluded ramblings. Photo, Kat." 

Wordlessly, Kat held out the first photo in fingers that were literally shaking with anger and loathing. In one swift movement, Mereii turned it over and held it in front of Otto's eyes. 

"Case in point. These particular ordinary people were all competent medical professionals, like me. They probably saved a lot of lives, and would doubtless still be doing so today, if not for you. Photo, Kat." 

He flicked the first image to the floor. It landed face down, but Kat could nevertheless imagine its content. She felt sick, and _she _hadn't been forced to see it. 

"Now, _these _people would be alive today if they hadn't chosen the wrong night and the wrong club to visit. Again, normal, innocent people. Do you remember, Mr. Octavius? Do you remember who did this to them? Please, feel free to share any observations you might have." 

That night distinctly appeared in Kat's mind. He had gone to Fallen; she had thought of going, but had been persuaded to head to Cat's Eye instead. It was then she had learned of the distinct different between the tentacles and Otto. It was then that she'd started to understand him on a wider scale, start to get the big picture. That memory made her smile inside, but the fact he'd killed someone didn't. And she remembered the way he'd reacted, what she said, and everything else, like it had happened yesterday. 

She was glad for her own thoughts, for every happy ideal she'd had in those precious few seconds disappeared as she glanced over to Otto. 

Her heart thudded double-time, and after that glance, Kat could hardly bear to look at her friend, who was shrinking away from this latest picture with a dazed expression of utter horror. An unreasoning guilt was growing in his deadened eyes, increasing as Mereii's words penetrated his clouded mind. 

"II didn't_I _didn'tit was-' 

"-YOU, Mr. Octavius. Photo, Kat." 

"Dr. Mereii," said Kat, through gritted teeth, "I don't think-" 

"_Photo. Kat."_

The next image was twitched from her hand. Mereii advanced on Otto, who had backed away as much as the loops of his restrained actuators allowed, which wasn't much. "This is the 9:15 train to Uptown and Queens. It carried three hundred and forty six passengers. As you can see, _because of you _it suffered something of aterminal diversion." The psychologist stooped rapidly, placing himself practically nose-to-nose with his shellshocked patient'. "Have you any idea how many people could have been killed that day, _because of you? _Have you any conception of how many lives you've destroyed?_"_

Behind him, Kat looked up, startled. The condescending tone had slipped for a second, revealing a strangled note of pure hatred. Carefully, she turned the next photo over to see what it was. 

She gave it a glance 

one glance was enough. Hands working practically on instinct, she grabbed the image off the pile and shoved it under the paper of her report that was still tacked to her clipboard, heart thumping. 

"Clearly not." Mereii was saying. "Not enough, in any case. Kat?" 

He took the photo she handed him, and gave it a puzzled glance. "HmmI seem to have gotten these out of order." he murmured, eventually, taking the pile from her and riffling through them. "Anyway, Mr. Octaviushopefully I've given you an insight into exactly what manner ofyou are. I'm sure that if you remember-" 

He was cut off, suddenly, by Otto's voice, low and shaky but desperately determined. "Youyou're wrong." 

John Mereii stopped his pacing as if he'd walked into an invisible wall. He stood still for a moment, his back turned to Kat, his expression hidden. Then, he turned and crouched in one movement, hissing into the doctor's face. 

_"You'remonster, _Otto Octavius." 

"DR. MEREII!" 

It took Kat a second to realise that she had been the one who'd spoken, or, more accurately, screamed. Once she did, however, her brain worked at super-speed, sending her hand down to the cell phone in her pocket, fingers secretly punching out Escher's home number. 

"I'm _so _sorry," she said with acidic sweetness, as her employer turned vituperatively towards her, "my cellie's vibrating. Hold on a second." She gave him a God-am-I-blonde grin and put the phone to her ear. "Mmyep, Kat speakingOh, Escher, hi. Look, I'm glad you rang- something's come upI know I said I wouldn't need you before Sunday but Dr. Mereii's just kindlyclarified the situation for me, and I think I'd like to try something Saturday, 9 AM. Can you make that?" 

_"what?" _said Escher, in her ear. _"Kat, is that you? You never said anything about Sunday in the first place. Are you okay?"_

"Oh, yeah." said Kat, still grinning and rolling her eyes for Mereii's benefit. The psychologist had stood up and was now watching her suspiciously. "John's just been giving me a few ideas on how to achieve _progress." _

"But youoh." Escher's voice dropped to an alarmed whisper. _"Is Otto okay?"_

"No." said Kat in the same, cheery voice, looking straight at Mereii as she did so. "Gotta go, okay? See you _then."_

She clicked the phone off, shrugging apologetically at her boss. Mereii looked as if he was about to say something, but after a dangerously long period of volatile staring he simply nodded and turned back to the matter in hand. 

Once again composed, Mereii tapped his pen against the nearest tentacle. "You see, Mr. Octavius, Kat might be happy to attribute your unconscionable actions to thesethings, or at least to play along with your delusions of yourself as a decent' or honourable' manbut others, myself among them, are not so gullible. I only hope that the treatments we can give you here will allow you to see yourself as I do" 

Mereii gathered up the photos from the floor, giving his so-called patient a final, dismissive glance. Kat, still standing helplessly by the door, became aware that her grip had tightened on her clipboard to such an extent that it was cutting off the circulation in her knuckles. She could hardly believe what she had just witnessed. When they had entered the cell, Otto had been awake, partially lucid, and generally responsive. But nowhe was shaking like a malaria victim, and his grey-shadowed eyes were screwed shut, as if in an attempt to block out the terrible images that he'd just seen. Images that he was evidently _still _seeing, replayed _ad infinitum_ inside the exclusive horror show theatre of his crippled mind. 

Mereii allowed himself a small smirk as he walked for the door, shooing Kat in front of him. 

"But I can see that you have already begun." 

As the door _hssss_'d shut behind them, Mereii paused for a moment to sort through his papers and fold them back into his case, along with the bottle and the syringe. Biting her lip nearly hard enough to bleed, Kat looked back through the observation panel into room 712. 

And as she watched through the glass, Otto Octavius keeled slowly over onto his side in the center of his dead tentacles, curling in on himself like a man with a mortal wound. 

Katarina Morrigan was horrified. 

_No... _she thought to herself, nodding. _I don't think here's even a word for this. _

Kat was never a big fan of trying to get information from people when they didn't give it willingly. She held the view that if someone didn't tell you something, they didn't want you to know, and doing what John had just done to Otto was not at all the right thing. 

_No,_ she thought to herself again. John had no intention of trying to heal Otto, or make him a better person, or anything. He was _torturing_ her friend. Torturing, with a sort of hideously cruel self-doubt that no human being, and especially not Otto, after what he had gone through, should have to deal with. 

John Mereii was insane. 

_Or_she reflected as she stared out into the standard traffic, passing her apartment with Miss Griffin's residence in mind _Revenge?_

The thought was an odd one indeed, but it made sense. His words, his anger, his vengeance, it seemed specifically geared toward her friend, for some reason she didn't know. And to be quite honest, she probably didn't want to. But John had geared this torture toward the tentacled doctor and he had a good reason for it. Well, not a _good_ reason but a reason nonetheless 

At the next red light, Kat's thumb flicked in the bottom of her bull aka report, flicking up the photograph from between them. She eyed it, her stomach sinking even more (she thought it would be at about China). The woman in the picture, eyes closed in death, was recognizable to her. She'd seen this woman in pictures with Otto, the one he'd loved, dearly so. 

John was a monster to do this to her friend, and she would see him eating a lot of pavement or fist or tentacle, whichever came first. 

But regardless of this, she pulled into the parallel parking nearest Escher's apartment, which she as spending more and more time in. Very strange. She stepped inside and waited silently in the elevator as it rose, trying to figure out what to say. 

Escher glared at the empty canvas, seeking inspiration. Since her experience with Otto and Kat and _ew, _John, she'd had no ideas at all. This puzzled her, as one would think that finding a friend from five years ago would up heave a massive inspiration, but it had apparently sucked her dry more then anything else. 

She was still glaring at the canvas when a faint banging emitted from somewhere near the door. She placed down the pen which had been poking furiously at the canvas and glanced over. The banging continued, and with a sigh, she walked to the door, "WHO IS IT?"

"KAT!" 

Escher unhooked the bolt as Kat let herself in. The girl was paler then the artist had last seen her, and she was more mussed then normal. The other few times that Escher had seen Kat, she has been well-dressed, with her hair put up nicely, complete with makeup and the like. This time, it was clear she _had_ been nicely dressed and everything, but her hair was work then normal, the ringlets falling in lumps, and the faintest sheen of sweat coated her face. Her eyes were stricken, almost as if she had seen a ghost. 

The tumbling that her organs apparently decided was necessary gave her a very, very bad feeling about this. 

"Tomorrow," Was the first word that came tumbling out of her mouth. No greeting. No wit or sarcasm. Escher's organs found it appropriate to tumble some more, and she thought for a moment she felt her heart was where her kidney should be, "We do it, tomorrow. No questions, no declining." 

"Otto?" 

Kat nodded, and licked her lips to speak, "And if he _is_ insane, we'll get him to another hospital. I think, if I see John once more, I may decide to take these nails," She held up a set of well polished and manicured nails, "And dig them into his eyes, such as one does to a new carton of ice cream, and let his _blood_ drip down his _face_. And LAUGH. And I am _not_ a sadistic person." 

Escher's organs righted themselves but instead twisted in circles, causing a new sort of feeling to rise in her body. A few neurones clicked together in her mind, "What did he do?" 

Kat shook her head, "Don't bother asking. You don't want to hear. Just know that it is not a good thing, in fact, I think we can throw it under the laws he's breaking under breaking the bill of rights, eighth amendment, constitutional violations." 

Escher blinked a few more times. Her able imagination was still having problems equating the extremely vivid description of revenge that Kat had just given her with the whole not-being-a-sadistic- person thing. Especially since Kat looked like she had stepped straight out of an infomercial about chronic stress in the workplace. 

Kat tapped her foot, "Do I really have to make myself nauseous and explain it to you?" She frowned, tapping a low-heeled shoe. 

"Errr...," she began. "This may be a stupid question, but putting that aside for a second...are YOU okay? And...no. No, I actually don't think I want to know, this time." 

"I'm fine. If not a bit nauseous. Do I REALLY look that bad?" She looked into a conveniently placed mirror. "Oh. I do look that bad. Eep. either way," She shrugged a bit, "What's today? Friday, right?" 

"Yeah. That's why I'm here, and not sitting in a classroom-stroke-morgue across town drawing bits of frog anatomy." 

"Sounds like fun," She smiled dryly, "Nothing like frog anatomy. Most of my later classes involve prisons, so it's really just a thrilling. But I'm sort of one-minded on saving Otto at the moment, so college has to wait." 

Escher sighed, flopping onto a vague shape that might have been an armchair under a dustsheet. "What do you suggest?" 

"That's where you come in. I spent the time I WASN'T bullshitting a report - which he didn't fall for, by the way - digging through old newspapers that weren't the Bugle. What's this with the mindmap goggles'?" Kat grinned faintly, "Strange thing is, I understood exactly what they were meant to do and how they did it. Brilliant, I'll admit, but as far as sanity goes, well..." The grin turned to a smirk. 

Escher had lost her droopiness pretty quickly at the mention of the goggles. In fact, she now appeared to have a steel rod in her spine, bolt upright and remembering. "They." There was a moment of abject silence. Escher _knew_ those goggles, exactly what and how they were down to every inch of plastic frame and metal chip. 

"I remember...it was like he wasn't...in there." She waved her hands vaguely, trying to convey the terrifying blankness she could see so clearly in her mind's eye. "When he wore them, it was like everything that made him... ...well, _him..._was wiped out." She shuddered despite herself. "I remember there was this red light between the lenses...like the tentacle lights. I have no idea what that red light means...probably something was working with his head, though." Escher swallowed, than spoke slowly, her voice brittle. "I walked in on him when he was testing them out, Kat. He nearly...h-he nearly..." 

The other girl leaned in, listening intently. 

"He nearly killed me, Kat." 

"We _met_ by him nearly killing me." The voice was nothing more then its standard dryness, "I thwacked an actuator with a baseball bat. He didn't take too kindly to it." 

"A baseball bat?" Escher looked up, a disbelieving grin taking over the mildly worrying expression that had formed on her face over the course of the last few sentences. "Wow." 

"He was stealing food straight out of my refrigerator for the past week. I thought it was Spider-Man. Saw something go towards my fridge, smacked it. Turned out it was a tentacle instead of Spider-Man." She smirked. 

Escher laughed. "The best I managed to do was thump him in the back of the head with a plank." 

Kat shook her head, standing and striding over to near the window. "Ohit's been pretty crazy. A friend of mine spilled _applesauce_ all over him. Not a little bit either. A LOT bit. It was funny. I was laughing so hard I was crying." 

"I'm not even going to ask." Escher grinned as she got up and wandered to near Kat. 

"I saw all about you in the paper." The psychologist replied, "Mmm, trauma." 

The girl frowned. "Trauma isn't exactly the word I'd use..." 

"What would you use then?" There was a joking hint in her voice, "Perhaps a severely stressful ordeal involving a dangerous criminal?" 

Escher picked at a loose thread on the couch. "I don't know exactly. I've had so many people telling me what must have happened over the years that sometimes it feels like...I dunno...the actual experience has been redacted from my memory...if that makes any kind of sense at all." She looked up, appealingly. 

"Yeah. I can't remember what it's called but it's someone-or-other's theory that if you think different from a big crowd you'll think you're wrong. But I know what you mean. But actually, it's not your problems that puzzle the hell out of me. It's Otto." She frowned and stared out the window, twirling a bleached ringlet. 

"He's a puzzling person." said Escher, smiling with resurrected optimism. "I remember that much." 

"It's not just that, though. Even when I knew him," Kat's voice was troubled again, "He was puzzling. But when he was doing this thing with the goggles he was just...angry. Like...I never remember him being that...that angry when I knew him. He was angsty, yeah, and depressed, yeah, but not that...that irritated." 

"Well...that was a while after you knew him." said Escher. "How did you...uh...leave him?" She thought a second, then added: "I mean, did he just disappear or what?" 

"He was just like it's time for me to go.' because, I don't know, one too many close calls with me or anything and he just...left. Called me occasionally, and we kept in contact with some cell 

phone or something he had, and then he just...stopped calling." 

"Mmhm." Escher shrugged. "Well, between then and the point where he decided to attack the Science Museum he sure seemed to have gotten some serious issues from somewhere. I guess we'll never know, unless he recovers... and what I've seen so far hasn't exactly given me much hope of that." She flopped onto the couch and started to relace an already perfectly acceptably tied shoe. 

"He better recover or else I'll be going to jail on assault and battery on beating the shit out of my boss." Kat responded in a dark growl. 

"If it comes to that, you'll have a willing accomplice." Escher was only half joking. 

"It's just..." She moved from the window back to the couch, falling over it next to Escher, "I'm going to school for this. I mean, partially because of him. And I can't fix him. I'm feeling really pathetic right now." She grimaced. 

"It's okay." said the younger girl quietly. "You're helping. We're helping. That's all we can do." 

"You're right." Kat replied firmly, standing up once more and pacing back towards the door, "So tomorrow, 9 AM?" 

"Yes." Escher responded, rising too. "If you think there's still hope, I'm...uh...with you all the way." 

"If he can live through all he's lived through and get out reasonably sane before this, then we can get him back into that mode." Her voice was not as sure as she would have liked it to be, but she continued anyway, "And if not, I still have to clock John." 

"Same here." murmured the younger girl. She wandered over to the nearest shelf and picked up a heavy-duty decorator's roller, hefting it absentmindedly between her hands as she gazed into the middle distance. "See how much progress he makes looking for his teeth, huh?" 

The older girl couldn't help a laugh as she opened Escher's door, shaking her head, "And don't be asleep. I don't do well with waking sleeping people. I'm told my methods hurt." A grin followed. She closed the door behind her as she left.

The next morning dawned weirdly misty and still, the sort of day that can only be described as _boding. _As Kat's Focus drew up into the asylum's small lot, the atmosphere inside twanged with tension. Both Kat and Escher had passed the ride in silence, the older girl paying a great deal more than average attention to the road, while her companion stared out of the window, one leg jiggling as if eager to be somewhere else. It didn't take any feat of empathy to guess that each was thinking along the same lines. 

_It's our last chance. If we can't wake him up today _

then what? 

Kat locked her car and walked towards the main doors, with a glance to see that Escher was falling in behind her. Escher followed the psychologist up the stairs, halting at her side as she stopped to check that Mereii wasn't anywhere in sight. 

"Okay." Kat said, once she'd leaned around the next corner. "I figure that by now, pretty much all of whatever John's been keeping him under with'll have worn off- that's including the shot from yesterday. So basically, the way he is now is probably what's" 

"What's left." finished Escher, quietly. 

Kat rubbed the faint scar above her eye. "Yeah. So it's either that he'll be okayor nearly okayrecoverable, whatevernot. And if not, thenwell, i guess we'll have to try and get him moved or something, ifnot." 

"Yeah." said the younger girl. "I guess we can't just leave him here." 

Kat turned round on her, eyes sparking. "We're NOT leaving him here. Not after what I saw." 

The sound of a door opening somewhere out of sight made them both jump. Pulling Escher after her down the narrow hall, Kat reached the first door and swiped her card, the two of them ducking inside just before an orderly turned the corner and headed for the lifts. Kat allowed herself a sigh of relief before switching her attention to the cell's occupant. 

"Kitty?" Still in the odd position he'd been in before their hurried entrance, Star looked up at them. Lying half on the floor with his legs reaching up one wall, his attitude reminded Kat strongly of the contorted shapes her friend Halley used to wind up in while watching TV. At the sight of Escher, however, he slid sideways and sat up rapidly. 

You brought her back? You said you'd try to get her and _that_ away from me!" He seemed more hurt than angry, for the moment at least; a finger stabbed at _that, _which was apparently just to Escher's left. "Why did you bring them back? I told you they're bad and they want to take them away from me even worse!" 

Kat sighed. The problem was that you just couldn't argue with a schizophrenic about their delusions. An idea which to a psychologist (or any reasonably balanced person for that matter) would seem laughably unbelievable was simple truth to someone like Star, as irrefutable as night following day. Every system of logic in Star's brain told him that the concept of stealers' made perfect sense, so there was no persuading him otherwise. The best you could do was medicateand negotiate. 

"It's okay, Star." she said, stepping away from Escher and towards him. "You know I'm not a stealer, right? Remember how you said I've got one following me?" 

Star fidgeted, clearly caught right on the edge of his mercurial temperament. Kat watched him carefully, trying to work out how to tip him the right way. "Uh huh. Her. But she's bad and evil, Kitty, and I want her to go away before you start listening to her stealer, too!" 

"I won't ever do that." said Kat. "You know why?" 

A wary shake. 

"Because stealers can't hurt me, Star." 

"Why?" 

_Careful. _"I don't know why, they just can't. And while I'm here, they can't hurt you either. Okay?" 

The young man looked uncertain. Kat knelt and kept eye contact, talking earnestly. "Has her stealer done anything to you?" 

"No" 

"Well, it won't, because I told it not to. Didn't I, Escher?" 

"Er, yes." said Escher. "Definitely." 

"I have to go now," Kat continued, "and I'll take her with me, don't worry. But if you see her again, I want you to remember she's okay. Her stealer won't hurt you, or I promise you, I'll kick its ass." 

Star giggled at this, and Kat knew she'd won. For now. 

"Okay, Kitty!" Grinning, he rapidly dropped onto his back again. By the time Kat had scooted Escher out into the corridor ahead of her, he was upside down against the wall once more. 

Kat paused momentarily outside cell 712. "I kind of wish I hadn't done that." she said, in response to Escher's questioning glance. 

"He seems to trust you." said the younger girl. "Wouldn't he believe you if you told him there's no such thing as stealers'?" 

Kat gave her a look. "Would you believe me if I told you there's no such thing as gravity'?" 

"Er" 

"Exactly. Come on, let's get this over with." 

If Kat had been hoping for a miracle, her first glance at Otto would have shot that hope out of the sky. As the door _hsss'd _shut behind them, she approached the still figure of her old friend, who did not so much as blink. Escher made a move forwards, too, but Kat touched her arm, indicating that she should stay near the door in case another orderly came along. The girl nodded, and stood back. 

"Otto?" Kat half-whispered, sitting down so she was directly in front of him. "Otto, it's me, Kat." 

His pupils were undilated, she noticed, but his eyes were still dull. She had been right- the drugs had worn off- but there was no change for the better, none. He was entirely motionless, watching infinity. Gone. 

"Otto," Kat hissed, fighting a spiky lump of despair that felt lodged in her vocal chords, "you have to help me out here. I'm all out of ideas." Riding the despair came anger, rage aimed not at him but at what he'd become, at the unimaginable pressures that had forced him to this state. Past reason, she found herself yelling, her voice choked. "I can't help you if I can't get through! GODDAMNIT, OTTO, TALK TO ME!" 

There was no response. 

Kat slumped back, a hand running aimlessly through her hair. As a psychiatrist, she was beaten. As a friend, she was beaten. The only even remotely good thing she could think of was that he looked calm. She hoped, fervently, that whatever was left inside him was somehow at peacealthough the only remnant of expression that remained on his pallid face worried her terribly. It was unchanged from the first time she'd seen him here; the faint but unmistakable look of being _lost._

"Oh, Otto" Kat said, quietly. "You're not coming back, are you?" 

Then she stood up, slowly, her vision hazed with shreds of memory. It seemed so unfair that she could restore him to what he'd been in a heartbeat, but only in her mind's eye. She could see the Otto she'd known as clear as dayif only 

A small sound behind her brought her sharply back to herself. She spun, and saw Escher standing over by the wall, poking at the cloth restraints around the upper left tentacle's inert claw. 

"ESCHER!" 

The girl started, and something _pinged _from under the cloth and rolled into a recess of the padded floor. Kat practically sprinted across to her, snatching up the thing as she went. "What the hell are you doing!" 

"Nothing!" said Escher, with a wide-eyed look about as innocent as Jack the Ripper's. "I just wanted to see if the tentacles look how I remember under all this cloth and straps and junk. Look, I'm putting it back the way I found it now, okay?" 

"So what's this?" Kat held her palm out, the tiny screw glinting in the middle. The younger girl stared at it, and from her expression it was clear that she hadn't a clue. 

"Ohsorry." 

_"Sorry?" _Kat scrabbled at the cloth that partially covered the inhibitor collar. "Are you trying to drive me crazy too? I told you, without him they could kill us!" 

"I said I just wanted to look!" snapped Escher, holding the cloth back so the psychologist could see the collar's smooth metal surface. Swallowing her irritation for the moment, Kat squinted at it until she saw a minute dark spot by one of the bevelled joins. With infinite care she dropped the screw back into it, turning it laboriously with her long fingernails until the head sat flush with the surrounding parts once more. 

"Is that as tight as it goes?" 

"I can't GET it any tighter," growled Kat, "and unless you carry a power screwdriver in that sweater, neither can you. Anyway, if they're so far under that they can't even help him, one loose screw isn't going to make any difference. Now come on, I want to get out of here before anything else gets broken." 

Escher gave her a hurt look, then glanced to Otto. "Is he-" 

Kat felt suddenly weary, drained. "There's nothing more we can do for him, Escher." she said. "He'slost." She stood up and swiped the door open. "I'll drive you home, then I'll read through the stuff I got off John's computer, and thenI don't know." She shook her head, then held the door open for Escher and followed her out. 

"Goodbye, Otto." she said, and felt sick at the taste of the words. Then she let go of the door, and watched it shut. 

With the two young women gone, cell 712 lapsed into all-enveloping stillness once more. There was no sound, nothing but white and silence and white and silence and white and silence and- 

_-spink._


	7. Back When

"What about him?" 

Kat stopped trudging down the corridor and turned back to where Escher stood, uncertainly, outside cell 709. "Ohyeah, I'd better just check." She snorted, mirthlessly. "Wouldn't want to lose my job" 

Inside, Chet Karos stood waiting for them, leaning slightly against the wall in his characteristic relaxed-tension manner. He cocked his head at Kat as she entered, and for once he looked deadly serious. 

"Katarinait's started?" 

"What?" Kat really wasn't in the mood for Chet's mind games. "What's started?" 

"Hmm" The man closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, their vivid green staring into space in the direction of the door. He stayed like that for a moment, lips moving ever so slightly, and Kat had the distinct impression that he was counting under his breath. Then he shifted his focus back onto her, and when he spoke his tone was unexpectedly sincere, fast, and full of urgency. 

"You'd better go, Katarina, better run, very, very soon. Else you'll be caught, you'll be sent to a place you wouldn't like. Go to him, Kat, and go quickly." 

"What are you talking about?" asked Escher behind Kat. 

Karos set his creepy stare on her. Since entering the cell she had stayed mostly hidden behind the other girl to try and stay away from it, but it still felt like those malicious green orbs were staring straight at her. 

"Why, you'll get caught, of course." he replied with his usual certainty. "And you'll be sent to a place you don't want to go." 

Kat watched him intently, her face betraying deep thought. 

"Run, Katarina. Run, and run fast." 

And he smiled his smile at her, and she knew right then, whatever it was, it was important. 

So she ran. 

"Kat, what are you—-" 

_Hsss. _

Escher was interrupted by the closing of the thrice-reinforced, heavy door as Kat slipped out, her figure disappearing from the observation window. 

"What do you know." echoed the voice of the insane from behind her, and chills ran up Escher's spine. "We're all alone." 

Escher turned, as slowly as she dared. Suddenly, the cell seemed far too small a space for two people. She was quite sure that she and Karos could have been at opposite ends of a concert hall and she would still have felt uncomfortable, but here and now the feeling was suffocating. It intensified as she faced the man and noted that, yes, he was still grinning that arachnid grin. 

"Mr. Karos-" she began, carefully. 

"Please. Call me Chet." And there it was again, that odd courtesy which somehow seemed far more threatening than impoliteness, a sort of pleasant demeanour that had quite obviously never been used in a genuine context. It was charm by numbers, perfect but chilling. 

"Uh. Chet. Look, about what I said" As she spoke, Escher was acutely aware of the closed door a few paces behind her. There was an alarm button set into the soft wall by the frame, as in all of the cells, but right now it seemed a very long way away indeed. And also, assuming she _could _reach it, there was the problem of the trouble she would land Kat in if Mereii found out that she had left her alone and locked into a cell with a patient- 

"-And you wouldn't want to get Miss Morrigan fired, now, would you?" said Chet mildly, his words cutting into her chain of thought with laser precision. "That would make things very difficult indeed." 

She started, disbelief sleeting into her expression "Whoah, whoah, wait just a second. Thatsaying thatthat wasn't the future. That was _mind-reading. _Where did that come from?" 

The tall man quirked his eyebrows at her, amused. "I have a gift for reading people, Miss Griffin. It's not magic, and it's nowhere near as inexplicable as my _other _gift, which issomething else." The amusement drained from his voice as he continued; 

"In any case, it doesn't take any kind of gift to see that you're scared of me." 

"I'm not scared of you." said Escher, automatically. 

"No, you're absolutely terrified." Chet agreed, head on one side. "I just happen to dislike hyperbole. Yes, of course you're scared. Why shouldn't you be? It's human nature to fear what can't be understood. But then, you'd know all about _that_wouldn't you, Miss Griffin?" 

Escher continued to stand very still. She knew for a definite fact that there was a 0.5 mechanical pencil in her left sweater pocket. If Chet _did _attack her, she could at leastgive him a severe poking. 

"I'm sorry if what I said sounded rude." she said. "But I can't help being sceptical. I just don't believe inall that stuff." 

"Fair enoughbut consider that all that stuff' is my life's'gift' and the reason I'm incarcerated in this wretched place. I think I'm entitled to be less than impressed at someone belittling it." He made a tiny advancing movement, which was immediately matched by a large retreating one on Escher's part as she backed straight up against the sealed door. The straitjacketed man shook his head calmly. 

"You should really try to be a little less predictable, Miss Griffin. You're transparent enough as it isit's not going to help you when it all starts." 

"Whatare you talking about?" 

"You're already the weak link in this chain." continued Chet, matter-of-factly. "You know it, too- it's in your face, your voiceyour every movement. And, as Kat has just so obligingly proved, you can't always rely on everyone else to keep you out of trouble. What have you done this time, I wonder?" 

The girl's eyes narrowed. "You talked Kat into leaving me in here." she said. "I didn't do anything." 

Chet smirked. Escher got the impression that, had he been a normal (or at least less medicated) person, he would have laughed at this. As it was, he was Chet, so he smirked. "You didn't? You haven'tbroken something important, or anything of that nature? I'm sorry, I must have been mistaken." 

Escher turned her head slightly, apparently to examine the wall at her side. For Chet's sharp eyes, it was as big an admission as if she'd spoken. 

"As for Kat, I merely told her that she'd regret failing to act as I advised her. I merely saw that she was needed elsewhere, and I told her so. I had no idea she'd be so distracted as to leave you behind." 

"Well, okay." said Escher, a challenge in her tone. "What did you see? Where did she go?" 

"As you may have noticed, Miss Griffin, I don't generally deal in particulars." Chet's eyes were suddenly close to becoming those worrying, snake-green slits once again. "She's gone where she thought she was needed. And if you keep trying to test me like that." he added, "I'm afraid you'll find my patience isn't up to regulation standards." 

"Look, I already said that I'm not purposefully trying to annoy you." snapped the girl. "I just want to know that you haven't put Kat in any danger. My friends are important to me, _Chet. _That's why I'm trying to help Kat with Doctor Octaviusbecause unlike you, I care about people!" Possibly to alleviate the vagueness of this last statement, she stabbed her index finger in Chet's general direction with as much force as she dared, and fought the urge to add "So there!" 

"Because, unlike me, you're perfectly sane?" 

"Yes!" 

"Yes, I can see that." said Chet, tranquilly. "That's why you live absolutely alonewith a cat. It could also have something to do with all those annoying little OCD symptoms you carry around with you like so many lucky charms." 

Escher looked up fast, straight into Chet's overbright eyes. He gave her his biggest, most disquieting smile to date. 

"We can spot our own." he said. 

There was a crammed sort of silence. Escher opened her mouth, then realized that there was nothing she could think of to say with it. 

Kat slid inside the door as it closed, then turned to Otto. He didn't look up, but then she hadn't really expected him to. An absurd guilt prickled at her as she realised that she was actually getting used to him being in this condition. 

Her thoughts flew back to what Chet had said; that she'd better run, and run fast. Now that she had a second to think, she realized that she hadn't known _where_ she was supposed to run to or to whom, or anything. But her gut had told her here. Something was about to happen. And it was not going to be a good thing, she decided with a frown. 

She glanced out the door, trying to figure out what it was that would happen. Was a nuke coming to explode upon this very spot? 

Her eyes flickered up to the tentacle and the actuator collar that Escher had broken earlier- 

_Wait_

-and any further thought was suddenly wiped from her mind, replaced by the basic, frantic need to keep breathing. 

It had taken less then a second for the tentacle with the clearly unfixed collar to open and lash out at her like a striking viper, wrapping its claws around her neck and squeezing. Squeezing just a little too hard for comfort, rendering breathing difficult, very, but just about possible. 

Very strange, really, because she knew the personality of the actuators: if they wanted to kill her, they would have snapped her neck. That thought was painful in the way that a tooth is when pulled under Novocain, a sort of dulled aching. 

"Tent" she croaked, feeling her feet leave the ground. Fear was beginning to twist her stomach. The few thoughts she managed to have circled, scattered with panic. _ They can't kill me, because they know me. They wouldn't._ "It'sIt's me. Kat." The claw around her neck was constricting, slowly but surely. 

The actuator clicked and whirred. "Kat! Remember! I saved you!" She wrapped her hands around the two claw fingers that were around the front of her neck, giving a futile pull to try and get it away. "From the..saw." 

She felt her strength ebbing, and the tentacle sensed it too. It squeezed a little harder, and she found that it was much too hard to keep her hands around the claws. Even holding them up became a chore that she simply was too sapped to do. 

Her stomach churned even more at this. _They COULDN'T. They know me, they couldn't never, ever do this to me._

"Te." 

It was difficult to know what happened next. Perhaps Otto responded in some way, because the actuator screeched and chattered loudly enough for it to hurt Kat's ears at such close range, and dropped her. 

Katarina lay on the floor, gasping for breath. She rubbed her neck and watched the ground, her face wrinkled with the closeness of the encounter. A few more seconds and she could have died from asphyxiation. And from a tentacle, a tentacle that she had been so horrified to see so placid, the tentacle that she had saved time and time again from the police forces and the press and everything. 

A friend, interesting to say, had almost killed her. 

She looked up at it, her breathing finally settling to quasi-normal. The claw watched her carefully, silently. Reaching down to her, it opened and chattered. The screeching she'd heard before was toned down, cautious. Maybe even apologetic? 

"I'm fine" she said, still rubbing her neck, which she guessed was now bruising beautiful black and blue. "And youyou're alive." 

The actuator most certainly nodded this time, then nudged Otto with a closed claw. It clicked urgently at him, but he only looked at it with a dazed and foreign expression, blinking slowly. He opened his mouth to speak, but then immediately turned away from the apparently-worried piece of machinery attached to him. 

Kat looked down at the tentacle, which matched its flickering red light with her violet contacts. "I don't know what's wrong with him." she said, finally. "There's things in his mind that are making him confused as to what you are." 

She could have sworn the actuator frowned. 

Moving with increasing fluidity and grace as it geared itself up, the arm went back to nudging Otto carefully, chittering and scritching rapidly to him. He just watched it, his face confused. With a final nudge, the tentacle gave up, rose and looked at the three other mechanical actuators, their inhibitor collars still in place. It turned momentarily to Kat, then arched upwards to the collars fixed to the walls. Extending the familiar long and serrated spike, it methodically punctured each happy blue light, the three of them sparking before dying completely. As the blue died, red light began to shine through the cloth-bound claws above the collars, changing the very atmosphere of the room. Shadows shivered across the walls, now, the combined scarlet illumination strong enough to cast and dispel them as they moved. Kat shaded her eyes from the textile-diffused glare, and noted that it seemed as if a missing dimension had been sketched back into the cell by the light and shade that the arms brought. 

The three newly-awakened tentacles rose, opening their claws to the fullest extent to free them of the cloth shrouds. For a minute, the air was filled with teeth-jarring shredding sounds, bits of canvas and thread drifting to the floor as the makeshift restraints were methodically destroyed. Eventually, apparently cued by a sharp chitter from the first arm, all of them dipped and focused on Otto, claws gaping slightly as they shone their bright and bloody lights into his bewildered eyes. 

"Actuators."

The four arms looked sharply back to Kat as she spoke, swinging nearer to her. 

"Can you..tell me what happened?" She pointed to the back of her neck, trying not to touch the brusing. 

The first tentacle nodded as Kat moved closer, the verdigrised manipulators extending to reveal a sharp, steely wire in its depths. 

She eyed it dubiously. "That's larger then the one you used last time." 

The other three tentacles nodded to her. With a frown, she shrugged. "Nothing to lose, I suppose." 

The tentacle wrapped around her and slid the wire into her neck. This one, most definitely, hurt. 

"OW!" 

**We apologize. In simplified terms, a larger connection requires a longer wire, which in turn requires more pain. **

"It's fine" She looked at the three others within her frame of vision. "What happened?" 

**We shall do it this way instead**

"What?"

**A larger connection was needed to directly transfer information.**

"You mean you're actually showing me what happened?" 

**You will be an observer, a ghost of sorts.**

"What's wrong with him?"

**He does not know what we are. **There was an infinite amount of worry in that voice. 

"He doesn't know anything." 

**What is wrong with him?**

"I told you already." 

**Medication. We see. We believe the saying is fasten your seatbelts'.**

Kat would have needed a hell of a lot then a seatbelt to prepare for what happened next. 

Katarina had long mused about the exact nature of the link between Otto and the tentacles. The deep connection between the two, sight and sound and hearing and everything, had always struck her as the most fascinating thing around, so naturally she'd wondered what it was like. How did someone see two things at once, both what your eyes were seeing and the information from another being directly translated into your brain? Wasn't that, well, confusing? Hard to understand, at least? 

She would later compare the experience to watching a baseball game on TV; you could see it, you knew exactly what was going on, perhaps even more but couldn't do anything or say anything and no one saw you. 

The next several neurones that fired in her brain were all for eyes. She blinked and opened them, looking around blurrily. She wasn't quite sure where or when she was, but she began to recognize the place as Otto's house. She was in the kitchen, sitting on the table. She looked down at her body, which seemed solid enough to her, at least, but Otto paid her no heed and was wandering the kitchen aimlessly, the tentacles looking around for him; watching, like they always did. 

"I could have swornI didn't leave that window open. I wonderno, couldn't be" He looked up, his quiet tone failing to disguise the uncomfortable worry in his expression. "I better go down to the lab." 

Kat watched him continue to scrutinize the kitchen, looking for anything odd or out of place and completely failing to notice the young woman sitting about three feet away from him on the table. It would have been funny if it wasn't so _weird._

"No more blasted orange juice" Otto grumbled, turning from the fridge. Kat had the sudden hope that this really _was_ where she, well, _was,_ and the entire asylum didn't exist. 

Those hopes were dashed as he looked right through her and set one hand down on the table, on top of her own. His fingers went right through hers and tapped on the granite countertop absent-mindedly, prompting a squeak of shock from the girl, which he evidently couldn't hear. "Can we risk it?" 

One tentacle rose and chittered. Otto nodded, collected his coat and wrapped it around himself, grabbing his fedora and placing it on, before he was out the door. 

Kat followed, although it was more that she felt herself being pulled. She was being dragged through his memory by the tentacles, and this made her distinctly uncomfortable as she watched Otto pulled out a jug of orange juice from the nearest A&P and step up to the express counter, placing just that. 

"Will that be all?" asked the bimbo-esque cashier at the desk, with a plastic smile. 

"Yes," replied Otto gruffly, sticking his hand in his pocket for something to pay with. After a short search, he revealed several bills and handed them to the girl. That paid, he picked up his OJ and left with a sigh. 

**Watch the woman who our Father paid for his refreshment.**

It wasn't till after she watched the woman notice the silver gleam and glowing red eye of a single actuator, then reach for her telephone, that Kat noticed the voice. Shocked, she looked around. She had just managed to grasp the notion that no-one saw her here- that she was a phantom, a ghost of sorts that didn't belong here- and as a result she first thought the voice might be from her own mind. Then she realized her thoughts did not generally include phrases like our father', or have such a harsh, level quality. She looked around again, and this time she saw the red glow of an actuator's eyes surrounded by the three deathly claws. It floated near her, and it was talking. 

**You are watching a direct feed from Otto's mind, to our memory banks, to you.**

"Fascinating." she said quietly, as the tentacles walked her out. 

_Wait a moment_

She looked around, and saw that three other tentacles were there. Strangely enough, they lead back and then swung around her back almost as if. 

_As if they were attachedto me._

She looked down, sliding up her shirt a bit. Yes, there was the spinal brace, around her stomach. 

**A symbolic representation.**

This calmed her a bit, and she allowed them to continue walking, following the man. Otto quietly strode, blending in. If she didn't know him, she would have sworn he was just another hassled businessman on a late-night shopping run. 

With his head bowed and tentacles hidden, the doctor's view was severely limited. He did not see the police officers begin to trail him silently, nor did he notice the one who was shining a flashlight on the exposed actuator from the bottom of his coat until he was alerted. Kat, on the other hand, did, and she would have yelled herself hoarse at him if she had thought that there was a fraction of a chance that he could hear. 

Her point of view switched again, causing her head to spin. This time she was staring at the ground, and her hands were in her pockets, and the actuators were hidden under the four-year old trench coat that Kat had bought for—- 

_Wait _

I'min Otto's head. 

**Correct.**

Instinctively, she tried to move his head to look around, but found it impossible. Before she could experiment further, she was distracted by a new astonishment- the echo of Otto's thoughts and the voice of the tentacles, just as clear as if they werewell, as if they were in her own head, which wasn't far from the truth. 

The tentacles she could hear now, she realised, belonged to this period. Not the ones who had brought her back here. 

**Otto.**

_What is it?_

**There is a large light shining down on us.**

_This isn't the time for jokes._

**We do not joke.**

His head lifted, and his body turned around. It took a second for his eyes to focus on the bright lights of the police officers. And there were a lot of them. 

"You're under arrest!" shouted one of them. 

"Yes, I can see that." he replied quietly. Only Kat could sense the scramble of assessment that was taking place behind the calm mask, both intelligences searching the scene around them for a chance, an escape. "Though it would be possible for us to kill you all," he continued after a moment, as if making a remark about the weather, "I'd rather this didn't get any more unpleasant than necessary."

"How kind," remarked another officer, dryly. 

Two more men in uniform stepped forward, setting down a strange looking machine. The one on the left pressed a button, and suddenly, she felt a weight bear down on his back. A good sixty to eighty pounds. 

**Father!**

She had been aware of two presences in his mind before this moment, but at the next moment, the second was gone. 

Kat felt suddenly sick, and it took her a moment to realize that it was Otto's fear that was gripping her, making her vision blur with the sheer intensity of it as her- _his_- awareness started to drain away. Whatever the thing was, it was making both the tentacles and their host black out, forcing them to the ground. And then, in the final moment before the scene faded, Kat saw something that made her non-existent stomach lurch. Behind the machine, behind the glare, another police car had pulled up, its two officers getting out to join the throng. But it was the third man that slid from the back seat that riveted Kat's attention as Otto's vision faded away. 

It was becoming distinctly difficult to focus, but she could see he was tall and smartly-attired in a dark coat and tie. A set of small-rimmed glasses perched on a long, slightly pointed nose were the only thing that decorated his face. He stepped forward to stand behind the protection of the police who had obviously authorized his presence. She vaguely wondered who it was, most certainly not a policeman. Maybe a psychologist or something 

By sheer coincidence, the last thing that the eyes that Kat was currently trapped behind could see with any clarity was the face of the man in the suit. She saw that the familiar stare behind those familiar glasses was bright with a very _familiar_ bitter triumph 

and then the world fell away. 

This time, the voice of the tentacles, the tentacles that had brought her here, cut in sharply, bringing Kat back to her own world, **We knew nothing more until we awoke later, strapped with electric cuffs.**

_Couldn't Otto tell you?_

Their voices were layered with betrayal: **He would not tell us what went on.**

This most certainly amused Kat, but she said nothing. Instead, she tapped her lip curiously, _What happens next?_

This time, however, she was prepared for the out-of-body experience. As she felt her mind virtually fly out of her body, she blinked her non-eyes and opened them. 

She looked around a bit, and for a moment she thought she had simply been returned to the present. The location was the same- a particular rubber room, bearing a certain multi-armed occupant. But now there was also another man in the room, a certain doctor, who she now wanted to castrate many times over. 

_What's going on now?_

**Watch.**

She noticed Otto was not yet in any sort of straitjacket, but a set of smaller, more makeshift-looking cuffs still fit nicely around the four tentacles, which were looking rather submissive. Handcuffs linked his own wrists together. John Mereii, now attired in a white coat and looking, Kat thought, decidedly worn out, was occupied with unlocking a case, talking as he did so. 

"apologise for the delay, but I've been working extensively on these since your capture. I'm sure that when you see the effect, you'll agree that the results are more than satisfactory. From my point of view, at least." 

"I don't even know you." Otto said, lifting an eyebrow. "You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. What can you possibly hope to gain from me now?" 

"You ruined my life, Octopus." 

"My name is Otto Octavius, Dr. Mereii. I'd prefer you call me by my real name instead of some pseudonym created by a rather interesting newspaper," He was as polite as could be imagined, given the current situation. Kat was actually surprised she was expecting Otto to shred John to little pieces. 

"I'll call you whatever I want," John spat, clearly needing a lot of self-control. "Because you didn't have a care in the world for _me_, did you!" 

"Dr. Mereii, calm down." Otto sighed. "I think you can tell that I'm sane, and even if I wasn't, I doubt whatever insanity you see in me is bad enough to merit this." He looked around at the rubber walls. "And you're clearly a little bit out of it yourself." 

_Oh, well done, tentacle-boy. _If Kat's face had been in the same virtual reality as her mind, she would have winced. _Piss him off, that'll work. _

"I'm fine, it's you that's not." Mereii's face showed unconcealed hatred. He pulled four more tentacle-sized collars out of the industrial-looking case at his side. Kat recognised them instantly as the things which, in the present, had kept the actuators dead to the world and their host. 

"This won't hurt." said the psychologist, advancing a step. "Unfortunately." 

"Whatare you doing?" This wasn't really a question. Kat understood that this was a time when Otto was still one-hundred-percent himself, easily able to pick up on the malice in Mereii's tone and expression. He watched the psychologist warily, the cuffed tentacles twitching sporadically. But each time they twitched, the collars sparked and the actuators lowered. 

Kat blinked, and suddenly she was staring straight up at John instead of watching from behind him. 

**Otto, what is this man's intention?**

_I don't know. _

Once more thrown by this quick and strange transition, it took her a second to realize she was inside Otto's head again, hearing his thoughts, feeling his fear. She decided that when Otto was scared, bad things always happened. This seemed to be the trend. 

His eyes her eyes followed John as he pressed a switch on one of the collars, a small blue light flickering on. She almost saw the neurones click together in the mind she was sharing, feeling a surge of anger and panic. Her inward eye was dragged suddenly back to the open window that Otto had remarked upon earlier - and, with a lurch, she understood. 

"That's an inhibitor!" Otto hissed. "So someone _was_ in my house! It was _YOU!_" 

"I can see how you acquired all the doctorates you got, Octopus," John replied with a smug smirk. 

Otto's eyes widened. "MereiiYou're insane. What did you take? What have you _done?"_

With infuriating fake deafness, John snapped the collar onto the bottom left actuator, then deactivated and pulled off the electric cuff. "Brilliant, aren't they? I call them inhibitor collars." 

It took Kat several seconds to figure what she was hearing now. A new emotion from the actuators, something that hadn't even almost-touched the girl as a possibility. Crying. They were crying, like a set of three five-year-olds, wailing to their father as she felt their brother leave. She had a distinct mental image of three small boys, only five, latching onto Otto's leg as a dark force tore a fourth boy away. 

**Father! **

Father, please! 

Let us stop him! 

Kat could hear the new weakness in the voice of the actuators. One of them was gone, the ever-present quartet becoming a frantic trio. Otto's eyes looked down to the collared tentacle, which lay where it had fallen on the sterile floor. The heartlight had gone out. She felt, rather then saw, his eyes widen, his fright adding to that of the actuator's mechanical fear. 

_Yes! I agree! Do something! Anything you have to! Just get us out of here!_

The tentacles which were still responsive acted immediately to their host's panicked order, snapping forwards just as Mereii picked up the next collar. The psychologist stepped back, warily, but he needn't have worried- the next second, the most vicious burst of electricity yet surged from the temporary cuffs. Blinding white exploded around Kat as Otto screamed, the tentacles screeching and jerking in the grip of the current. 

As soon as he had reassured himself that the tentacles were unable to reach him, John stepped over a twitching, sparking actuator and snapped the collar around it, chuckling. "And they work excellently, as well."

Otto's voice was choked, furious, _frightened._ "I swear, Mereii, if I ever get out of here, I'll kill you." The deadly hiss that was hidden under the choked fear told Kat that he meant it. And it made her doubt her idea of freeing him if he killed John, even if he deserved it, she wouldn't be able to deal with the fact she had indirectly killed a man. 

John smiled predatorily at Otto as he locked the collar around the top left actuator. Said actuator's heartlight blinked, fighting, before falling out of its hovering position and onto the floor with a soft clunk. "That's a big if, wouldn't you say, _Otto?"_

**Father!**

The voice was weak and scratchy, so far from the hypnotic and swirling standard chatter of the tentacles that Kat was familiar with. Almost as if a famous singer had tried to sing with laryngitis. The actuator singular was high pitched and panicked, the last boy that held on for dear life. And now the father was holding onto the boy just as tightly as the boy was holding onto the father. One voice seemed so.so insignificant. This wasn't what actuators were. A wave of nausea rolled into her again, but she resisted it. Only now did it occur to her that she didn't know if that was Otto's fear and worry and everything else, or her own, or a combination of both.  
The previous doubts about saving him were gone. He would be free. She knew it. 

**Fath—**

The end of the word was cut off by the snapping to the collar around the last tentacle. The last boy ripped away from his father. If she tried, she could almost imagine that snap to be the end of the word, for the sense of incompleteness that resounded from the last of the last syllable was enough to drive her mad. 

_Actuators! Tentacles! Are you there!_

There was no answer. 

John stood up and dusted his hands. "Good night, Doctor Octavius." 

Now there was something alien in Otto's mind, something inexpressibly foreign and _wrong. _Kat strained to hear this new sound, and several futile moments passed before she realised that it wasn't a sound at all. The complete opposite, in fact. 

Silence. 

No voices. 

Kat guessed that the only reason that she was still in this memory at all was that maybe a few of the residual traces of the smart arm A.I had not yet been forced into oblivion. Still, she could sense the immense, crushing void that was building in the absence of the voices, and she guessed that if _she _could sense it, then for Otto it was probably ten times worse. It was like the difference between watching a TV that was receiving ordinary channel signals and one that displayed only constant white noise. The silence was maddening, like an unscratchable itch, and it was only getting more intense as the seconds passed. 

As she felt the strength of the memory that held her start to fade, Kat was returned to herself once again, a ghost that watched the fraying scene from behind Dr. Mereii as he took out a notepad and pen. Otto was pale, but otherwise still outwardly showing no sign of anything but rage. He yanked violently at the handcuffs, trying to rise- a futile action, as the immobilized arms were now nothing more than four massively heavy weights at his back. 

"If you want any kind of information, Mereii, take these things off." Otto was evidently struggling to stay calm, to sound reasonable. It is very difficult to do either when one is speaking through gritted teeth, but he was trying. "Justtake them off. I can ensure your safetyjust-" 

Uncapping his pen with a loud _click _that stopped Otto midsentence, Mereii gave him a level, terribly _interested_ stare, then smiled, cadaverously. "Intriguing." he murmured, and turned for the door, starting to write as he did so. 

Kat wondered vaguely whether he would feel anything if her discorporeal body kicked him through the stomach. Before she could try, however, the room and its occupants faded completely and left her in the dark, with the quiet, metallic voice of the tentacles in her mind. 

**And for us,** **that was the end.**


	8. About Being

Kat's stomach lurched again, she blinked once more, and then she was back in the present. A mildly-catatonic Otto was still staring at the floor. The three tentacles were still hovering around her, clicking to each other. She bit her lip for a moment, then stared down at the floor before forming her thoughts into some semblance of a sentence. 

Well, actually, just a word. 

_Horrific. _

**Indeed.**

_II don't know what exactly to say._

**How long have we been deactivated?**

_A little over a year._

**Incredible.**

_So, can you do anything about Otto?_

The tentacles' voice (quartet of voices, she noticed with a relieved mental sigh) were thick with worry again. **Katarina, we are trying.**

_I have no doubt in that. _Kat grinned a bit, looking towards the upper tentacle that wasn't in her neck. _I bet you are trying the hardest. _

She could imagine the identical weary smiles upon the four tentacles, **_Yes. _**

_Can Ican I do anything to help?_

**We do not know.**

_I had thought for a moment when I said Tentacle-boy that he had woken up and told you to let go. _

**We apologize for your injury as you can probably assume, hostility was the first reaction to seeing one that was not our Father. Your words did not awaken him, but they reminded us who you were, Katarina Morrigan.**

_Thank you. _

**We do not think Otto would have forgiven us had we killed you. For your awakening of our previous experiences, we are sincerely grateful.**

_Well, I suppose if not, I would have been deadI should be the one who's thanking you. _She gathered her courage. _I mean, when I saw you when I first came in here, it was pretty heartbreaking. I'm used of seeing you four as creatures of movement, sort of sinuous and seducing, you know? Seeing all of you dead like that is likelike the silence in Otto's head._

**We understand your words, Katarina. Though we do not know what we looked like then, we can only assume it was terrible, given the analogy.**

_It was. _

There was a silence broken only by the clinky noises as the tentacles looked from Kat to Otto. 

_Heycan you get out of my head now?_

**Of course.**

"Ow!" The feeling reminded her very much of being shot with a very large needle. The tentacle withdrew the wire and went back to its three brothers, all three of them looking down at Otto. Kat shrugged at one of the arms as it glanced back to her. 

She frowned as she went over what the hell had just happened there, some sort of direct transfer of memories the most horrifying of all of them being the fear and terror and that gripping _emptiness_ that Otto's mind had been without the actuators, and that was even without the medication. thinking of what it must be with the drugs made her stomach twist. And not only did the friend side of her recoil, but so did the psychologist side - Mereii might as well have ripped up whatever was keeping Otto firmly tied to sanity and just chucked it off the nearest mental cliff. which, in reality, was pretty much exactly what he did. She had to tell this all to Escher, explain to her every little minute detail about everything. Escher could help her fix it- 

_Oh **fuck**_

Kat replayed the scene in Chet's cell in her head, trying to assure herself that her first thought was absolutely and totally and completely wrong. 

_"Why, you'll get caught, of course." Chet had said, in his self-assured way, "And you'll be sent to a place you don't want to go. Run, Katarina. Run, and run fast." _

He'd smiled at her then, and she felt something. _Whatever it was he was talking about, it was important. She just _knew _it. _

So she ran. 

And then Escher's voice, unsure. "Kat, what are you—-" 

And she'd slid out of there as fast as possible. 

She swore again as she realized the idiotic blunder. She'd left _Chet _with _Escher_! 

She was screwed. Up the ass and to the left. And to make matters even worse, she could hear the humming of the elevator coming this way, and that was not good. Especially because, as she ducked into Chet's cell, she could see the sleek spectacle frames and pale face of a man who was smiling in a smug sort of fashion and was walking with one fist clenched around something, and papers in the other hand. Couldn't be a good thing, and she didn't want to think of what the actuators could do to John if they got their claws on him before Otto restrained them _if_ Otto restrained them. 

The door _hss'd_ shut from Kat just as John stepped to it, glancing inside. All he could see were two backs, one of them with a blonde bun at the top, the other a mop of frizzy purple locks. He hummed something, in a pleasant mood, and opened the door, looking down at Escher and Chet. The smile faded as he looked at Chet, turning into a passively-displeased expression, but the moment that he looked over to Escher, the smile blossomed in all its smug goodness, gained a slick coating of oil, and went from smug to pleased and businesslike. Kat actually had to bite her tongue to not let loose a not-uncommon torrent of obscenities. 

"Miss Griffin, Miss Morrigan." He paused, looking down at the third resident, "Mr. Karos." 

"Hello, Johnny." 

Mereii scowled down at Chet, his expression one of extreme displeasure. Chet smiled back at him, the almost copyrighted Chet Creepy Smile. John did not look afraid or amused, something that Kat was actually partially impressed by. It was hard to avoid being creeped out by Chet, but maybe when you were as much as a creep yourself, you were immune. Who knew? 

"Don't call me Johnny." 

"Or you'll what?" 

There was a rather nasty pause. Kat had a feeling that they were either: #1 fighting so fast that her eye couldn't track it or #2 shooting laser beams at each other in some spectrum that wasn't the visible one. Escher, on the other hand, got the distinct impression that John probably would have given Karos a good hard smack to the face if the girls weren't around. A few moments of vicious, evil glaring was the match between the two boys instead, and neither won as Mereii turned and headed back towards the door. 

Thankfully, because something out there loved Otto (or the girls were just lucky), he paused. Kat let out a very large relieved sigh, which would have been disastrous if John hadn't looked out the observation window. There was a moment of contemplative silence before he looked back at Kat over his shoulder. "Kat, I have some papers for you." 

"For what, John?" she asked, hoping that her expression was passive. 

"You didn't answer some questions about Mr. Octavius in your report," He had turned back to the window, and Kat could only imagine his expression was either full of hatred or smug success, "And I would like you to clarify, please." 

"Oh, of course," she replied instantly, "I'll get right too that." 

He turned around and handed the papers to her. She glanced briefly over them, silently cursing as she realized that everything she'd purposely avoided talking about in her paper (i.e. lack of medication, and the fault of the actuators) was directly questioned here on this innocent piece of paper. 

"I'd like that back by tonight, please." he said, (mock) pleasantly. 

"I'll get right on it." 

"Great. I'm going to check on Mr. Octavius." 

As Mereii turned to the door once again, only a single glance from Kat was enough to tell Escher that that was _not_ a good idea. The older girl's expression was a study in fresh-out-of-ideas panic, and _what were those marks on her neck?_

Escher was no psychologist. She couldn't follow other people's thoughts, in fact half the time she had difficulty sorting her own out. She was anything but eloquent, she was no genius, and when it came to the kind of intimidation that Chet could generate so easily she was less than an amateur. 

But she _did _have a hidden and curious talent, formed over years of unwanted analysis by child therapists that, though nothing like as downright unpleasant as Mereii, had had just as much belief in their own skill. Its evolution had been self-defence, really, not to mention Otto-defence- when she'd ran out of lies to match their questions, when the apparently shallow and easily-read front she had learnt to put up felt dangerously close to slipping, or when one of them just got on her nerves (mainly by excessive negative reference to her betentacled friend) she could always deploy it. Her secret weapon, her bizarre but never-fail ploy. 

No-one could fake asthma like Escher Griffin. 

And this was the perfect opportunity to showcase her gift. She began with a couple of short breaths, two just-shallower-than-normal gulps that nevertheless got the other three's attention immediately. This ominous introduction quickly built into an opening passage of hard breathing, as if she had just been on a brisk jog. Kat frowned, and touched her shoulder. 

"Escher, are you-" 

"I'm fine, it's okay, I'm fine." said Escher, indistinctly. "It's justkinda close in here. Gimmie a second, I'll be fine."Giving the older girl a sharp glance that told her that she _was _okay, she leant forwards a little and did the thing at the back of her nose that added a new dimension of _heeeeeeeeegh _into her outward breaths. Outwardly, she'd gone as white as a ghost, two brilliant scarlet flushes appearing on her cheeks. 

"You don't look fine, Miss Griffin." Mereii took a step forward, away from the door, and winced as Escher chose that moment to introduce an inhaling _wheeeeeeeeeeeee _to accompany the _heeeeeeeeegh. _

Behind them, Chet Karos let out a dry laugh. His was the expression of one who knew full well that they were watching a show, and furthermore wished that they had brought popcorn. "My God, Johnis that _concern?_ You're actually worried about someone else's well-being? Or could it just be the none-too-appealing prospect of someone falling seriously ill whilst under your supervision? I _wonder."_

"Shut up." snapped Mereii, turning on Chet with startling viciousness. 

_"Whoooeeeeeeeeeeehhhhnnghhh." _interjected Escher, and followed up with her second-to-last card, a truly frightening The Grudge'-style inward rattle. By this stage she was bent double, gripping the wall with one hand and her sternum with another. John, who had seemed seconds from decking his restrained patient, made a half-exasperated, half-anxious sound and moved to help Kat let the wheezing girl down to a sitting position on the soft floor. 

"Escher, do you have an inhaler?" It wasn't difficult for Kat to sound convincingly unnerved- the sounds that her friend was making would have put a knackered racehorse to shame. Between gasps, Escher managed convey that she did, indeed, and it was with the rest of her stuff, in her bag in Dr. Mereii's office. 

"We should get her down there." Kat said to her employer. "She could have a panic attack on top of this, any second. We should get her out of here, anyhowthis room's small enough to make anyone freak out." 

"You get used to it." remarked a conversational voice. 

"I told you to shut up." hissed John. "All right, let's take her downstairs. Do you think you can walk, Miss Griffin?" The last question was accompanied by such a surprisingly sincere look, Escher almost believed it. Almost. 

"I think so" she managed, as the they helped her to her feet. Chet watched them leave the cell, his eyes alert and thoughtful. 

"Remember I want out too, Kat." he said quietly as Kat passed him, leaving her to wonder what on earth he'd meant as the door pressured closed. 

Out in the corridor, Mereii seemed to regather his composure. Halfway towards the lift, he left Kat to support Escher on her own, standing back slightly to give the younger girl a searching glance. 

"Feeling any better yet?" 

"OhI think so, Doctor. I'll be fine." 

"Good." said Mereii, briskly. "Kat, if you'll take Miss Griffin to my office and find her inhaler, I'll just check on 712 and catch you up in a-" 

Before he could finish, before the look of trapped horror could rekindle itself on Kat's face, Escher played her ace. 

She passed out. 

The sharp _hssss _that heralded Kat's departure from cell 712 mingled with the smart arm's subdued and thoughtful clicking. Turning their claws from the door, they swung back towards their host, who was still curled into the corner as much as his restraints would allow. Half-lying with his right shoulder pressed against the padded wall, he was unaware of their synchronized stares, his barely-open eyes instead focused somewhere deep beneath the floor. A time dragged by in silence, seconds or minutes or hours being all the same in this empty little room. 

**Father?**

A claw snaked down and brushed across Otto's pale forehead, in an eerily human pastiche of a concerned caress. 

Falteringly, as if dreading what he might see, Otto lifted his gaze to the side, to the heavy, segmented claw that hovered there. Only for a moment, then he dropped his head again with the rapidity of a guilty child, the motion sending dark tangles of hair flopping over his eyes. 

The tentacles clicked again, urgently. One nudged him carefully in the ribs, then opened its head like a blooming, curling flower, the segments touching back on themselves to reveal the sharp little manipulators beneath. These gripped the buckled strap that kept his arms bound across each other, tightening on the tough white fabric just above the shape of his elbow. A twisting, ripping pull, and the strap shredded and snapped. 

Their host's reaction to this sudden display of strength was a sort of incredulous, terrified _huff. _His arms slid loosely to his sides, but it was doubtful if this new freedom was noticed, far less appreciated. 

**Otto, we have no time for this. We may be discovered at any moment. **Shaking off a few strands of canvas that adhered to their claws, the arms lifted slightly so that their host could not avoid looking at them. 

**Parletal lobe connections operating at 100. We know you can hear us.**

After a moment of silence, the actuators shifted impatiently. Their heads snapped fully open, simultaneously and with a startling blur of machine noise. Otto gasped and recoiled, but along with the primal yank of fear came something else. The actuators felt it at once, the rare solid shape of a coherent thought. 

_Get away from me!_

**That would be extremely difficult. **The smart arm A.I took a risk and opened the cerebral links that allowed him to see' through their camera-eyes, curling over to show him his back. **Not to say impossible.**

Otto screamed, or at least tried to, his voice rebelling against this sudden over-usage and cracking into silence. He shut his eyes- but the inexplicable sight of his own back continued for several more seconds before the actuators gave up and suppressed the connection. 

**Please, Father, don't be afraid. **Even with his eyes screwed shut, the voices continued. Calm, but with a note of anxiety, they seemed to echo from an origin point somewhere around the nape of his neck. Spurred by desperation, Otto grabbed with his newly-freed right hand at the place, pulling at the straitjacket's collar, and felt something cold and intricate. His numbed brain working on instinct, he tried to dig his nails under it, pull it from his skin- 

A claw closed around his wrist, restraining him gently but firmly. Its grip was shockingly cold, and as the guide diodes beneath the joints flicked between blue and red they cast strange shadows up his arm. When it let go he snatched his hand back and felt a dull ache begin in his arm and shoulder, which like his voice, seemed to resent being used. He flinched as the two upper tentacles gaped, illuminating the confined space a brilliant red. 

**This has gone on long enough. It is time for you to remember.**

But it was too much- too much to understand, too much for Otto's fractured sense of self to handle. He felt his grip on the world begin to slip away, and with a dull relief he did what he had learned to do over his time in the asylum; the only defence he had for whenever the bewilderment of reality grew beyond bearing. He let go. 

The smart arms watched silently as their host's eyes glazed over, his conscious thoughts fading to nothing. 

Nowhere. 

A huge, echoing space, crossed by heavy brick arches. Metal girders support the high ceiling, though both girders and arches are marked by the gashes and tears of some massive impact. Through the remains of the huge half-circle windows that span two of the walls, a thick, oppressive mist swirls. From time to time, the suggestions of shapes come into view through the murk, but they are indistinct and fade as quickly as they appear. 

There is strangeness here. In places, the rough brick walls flow into something else entirely, into slick grey-green tiles bordered by a thin stripe of scarlet. Craters scar these surfaces, crazed white lines radiating from their centres, and there is a sickly-stale anaesthetic bite to the air. The lights, eclipsed by the thick shadows of the far-off ceiling, are either circular and joined in clusters like insect eyes, or widely-spaced and square. It is difficult to say which, exactly, as like the walls they tend to shift in the periphery of the eye, refusing to be one or the other. Either way, they all have one thing in common- they are dead, the bulbs not blown or shattered but simply missing, gaping like empty eyesockets. 

The atmosphere here is damp, cold, and as dead as the lights. Tendrils of mist, with an almost tangible weight to their rolling curls, seep in through the glassless windows. The transient walls run with moisture, the floor is black and slimy. Parts of it are splintered, creating jagged pits with a suggestion of dark water below. 

Half-hidden in the gloom on the wall farthest away from the mist-cloaked windows, there is a door. Surprisingly, there is nothing ethereal about it. On the contrary; it is large, and solid. It has a burnished steel surface, and an extremely businesslike set of hinges. In fact, it has practically everything a door should have. Apart from a handle, that is. 

There is no furniture, although in places there is a suggestion of corners, of pieces of arching, carefully-sculpted metal, of laboratory grey and surgical blue. Again, these slide away if viewed directly, ghosts of objects in a ghost of a room. 

Otto Octavius looks up from where he is sitting, on the steps which lead up to the raised window area, and regards the merging walls without interest. He has spent more and more time in this place, lately, and it never changes. 

The straps of his straitjacket are still torn, even here- there's no fixing that- but his arms are folded across his knees in an attempt to emulate their effect. His eyes snag on a place to his right where the greenish tiles currently have the upper hand. On closer scrutiny, they are flecked with a dried substance, a dark orange-red spray that travels from floor to ceiling. Otto stares at the stained tiles, his expression bleak. 

Then 

**We thought that we might find you here.**

Abruptly, the freezing greys and blues that make up the palette of this place waver, assaulted by a strong red glow. Otto turns and finds himself eye to camera-eye with a smart arm. The shock sends him clambering to his feet, stumbling down the steps onto the treacherous main floor, unbalanced by the new weight at his back. 

"No." he breathes. "No. You can't be here." He has never tried to speak while within this limbo-space, and it is startling to learn that when he does his voice comes easily. 

**If you were yourself**, **you would understand that your own mind is not a secure hiding place. Not from us.** The tentacles turn their heads elegantly, scanning their surroundings with clear distaste. **Not even as deep as this.**

"What _are _you?" He raises his arm in a warding gesture as a claw comes too close. The tentacle stops, affronted. 

**You know what we are. We are your creations.**

Otto turns rapidly, like a child trying to see the back of his own head. A short, incredulous laugh escapes him. "How could _I_ create you? I'm" 

**ill?**

"Yesand dangerous" 

**Is that really what you believe? Try to remember.**

"Remember?" His eyes flick to the blood-spattered section of tiles, then close. "II killed all th-those people" 

**No, Otto, **snap the voices, sharply. **Remember the _truth. _**

"Thetruth?" 

**You are not sick. Neither are you abnormal, or a monster. Insanity may have been thrust upon you, but we think you have reacted well, considering. It is merely unfortunate that, without us, the defences you constructed turned all too easily into thisplace. You are becoming trapped in here, and you must leave.**

Their host shakes his head, helplessly. "I don't understand-" 

_"It's not about understanding, you dumbass, it's about being. About living."_

The words come out of nowhere, female, and angry. A young woman steps from the recess of the nearest arch, gesturing frustratedly as she speaks. Animated and determined, colourless and almost entirely transparent, she gives him a glare that fails to conceal the concern in her eyes. Otto returns her gaze, trying to comprehend. 

"Whois she?" 

**Katarina Morrigan. The psychology student, the young woman with whom you formed an association some time ago. She's been trying to help you, Otto. **

"Kat" 

**And she's not the only one.**

Another misty figure, another girl. Barely in her teens, disarrayed dark hair and a trusting grin. _"It'll be all right." _she says, and her spectral shape changes as she speaks. Even as she morphs, however, even as she gains height and age and spiky purple hair, she keeps her bright pinball smile._ "You'll be okay. You've come this far, right?"_

The figures dissolve, wreathing back into the grey vapour. Once again alone, with his smart arms hovering anxiously around him, Otto stares into the darkness beyond the arches. For a moment, his expression clearsbut it clouds over soon enough, and he shakes his head again, sitting down on the lowest step. 

"I'm notto talk to you" he mumbles. 

**So you _do _know what we are.**

"No, I" Otto stops, suddenly uncertain. "I" 

**Yes. **An arm dips to the soaking floor, scooping up a clawful of broken glass and letting the fragments fall noisily between its manipulators. **You do.**

Otto blinks. Glass 

_Thoughts drifting in the dark, delicate things, fluttering, fading. Memories falling away like glass, sharp shards of glass shattering and flying, lethal glass shards that took her away, took _

who? 

Matter. Matter and molecules, pulling at each other, strings of atoms like pearls in the dark. Matter equals mass, the laws of mass cannot be broken and matter cannot be created. Matter, and what did anything matter now? What did 

Light and dark, freeze and burn. Still falling, away from the terrible heat, falling slowly, cold and crushing, lungs burning. I will not die a 

I will not die. 

But it's so easy, letting go, staring into the heart of a sun and letting everything fall away. Power, power was behind everything, the power to create so easily turned into the power to destroy. The power to choose 

But he had chosen. 

He had chosen to live. 

**Otto?**

Otto opens his eyes. He is standing in front of the window, gripping the empty trellis-like frames as if they are bars. His forehead rests on the clammy metal, his skin is wet from the mist that still drifts from the false and featureless void beyond. 

"Yes." he murmurs. 

And then he turns, and strides straight and sure-footed across the unravelling room. His tentacles snake around him, chittering gladly, their heart-lights chasing the thick shadows before him away into nothing as he walks. 

The door, when he reaches it, remains solid and featureless as it has always been. But now he stands before it, he can see something new; that, set into the arching brick over the frame, there are letters. Words. 

Otto reads the message, from himself to himself, and smiles. Slowly, thoughtfully, he laces his hands behind his back, regarding the door as if for the first time. It has no handlebut since when did that matter? 

_Actuators?_

His creations rear back, and tense 

**Welcome back, Father.**

and _strike._

This would have been a startling change from the ordinary on any day, but especially today. On any other day, when he opened his eyes, he would see that stark, bleak whiteness and feel empty. That emptiness would roll back into him as guilt and shame, and that guilt and shame would cause him to close his eyes again, and he'd open them so many hours later when even his mind became too hideous, and would repeat this cycle, over, and over, and over again. 

Not this time. 

On every previous day, the eyes he had opened were grey, hazed-over, murky and lost. Those eyes he had opened every day before this were deadened and empty and simply not his. They were the result of several monsters assaulting him at once, without his bodyguards that he'd become so familiar with over a time, so much so that he didn't realize how much he suddenly missed them and needed them. 

But not this day. This day, he opened his eyes, and the whiteness was no longer so stark. It was tan, highlighted in red as the actuators around him shone. The empty void had been filled with a quartet of four constantly chattering voices, whether it be to him or each other. The fact was, it filled that space that the guilt had attacked him from, and the guilt may have still been there, but this time, it wasn't so bad or aggressive. It was just a part of him, much like those four voices that, if possible, felt hopeful in his mind. 

His eyes, on this day, were hazel-brown, a deep chocolate colour that was not lost nor confused. Those eyes were sure, a bit angry, and very shocked. But there was no emptiness in them anymore, the haze had gone, and if the straitjacket could have been ignored - he looked as if he'd simply been sleep deprived. 

**_Father?_** the actuators asked nervously, their mechanical voices anxious. **_Otto?_**

"Come down here." he murmured, beckoning with a hand. A single tentacle lowered to his hand, and he set the flesh-and-blood arm on top of the mechanical one gently. The metal was shockingly cold under his fingers, but he kept them there, remaining silent and staring into the door. He closed his eyes in thought, trying to remember. 

**_Do not go there!_** Their voices were loud enough to cause him to wince as they shrieked in his head. 

"I wasn't." he replied, tapping the hard exterior of the actuator under his hand, "I'm trying to remember why and how I got in here. I won't go there again I promise." Even as he thought about the darker recesses of his mind, he felt a shiver spiral down his back. A shifting, twisting abyss devoid of anything but guilt and shame, the kind that he needed yes, needed the actuators to help him coexist with. And to think that that empty abyss was part of him did not please the man, but there was no way to avoid it. That void was needed; a place to dump all issues and keep him as outwardly positive as possible. He simply needed to avoid entering it like he had and _especially_ avoid staying in it. 

He closed his eyes again, telling the actuators beforehand that he was okay. This time, he was allowed silence as he opened a decrepit filing cabinet in his head, one called memories'. Not too long ago this cabinet had been padlocked and chained, but he could now rip off both with ease and open it, finally. 

Names. Escher, John, Michael, George, Rosie, Larry, Kat, Matthew, Randy, endless names of people he'd known since forever. The list when on for thousands of pages and hundreds of books within that file, but he closed it with the knowledge that there was no time to search through all of it. A quick prayer followed; one that prayed everything was still intact. That time he didn't have to search the names was due to the fact that he knew he had to get out of here, and get out fast. The actuators heard him and rose, and he felt the metal under his fingers leave and curl back to strike like a set of coiling rattles. 

_No._

They stopped, the built-up kinetic energy disappearing into the air. Their coils turned from the door to him, clicking rapidly, confusedly. 

**Why, Father**? 

_I want to wait for Kat and Escher. _

**Why? We wish to leave this place as soon as possible. It is not safe for us.**

_Noit's not. But we have to._

**Why?**

After a moment of thought, he decided to test his voice, "I want to thank them." His throat rebelled, and his voice cracked on them', but he continued anyway, "And to tell them both howgood it is to see another face," crack, "especially their facesand ask how long I've been here." 

**A little over a year.**

Otto's eyes widened, "Aa year? I've been in this.this _coma_ for a year!" 

**Miss Morrigan has informed us of such.**

"She was here?" He stared into the distance, trying to focus. Something clicked in his haze-blurred memory. 

_"Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable." _

Those words had snapped into his head with the force of a giant rubber band, slamming against the walls he'd erected from the outside, cracking them in the slightest. Through those cracks had leaked memories, the most predominant a continuation of the girl's words. "Footfalls echo in the memory down...the...passage that we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose garden..." 

And the crack began to widen, spiralling down his walls like spider webs as he felt the gaze of the two girls on him. The fact that he could feel anything at all was an accomplishment, and slowly he rose from his sitting position inside his mind, strolling over to the door with a heavy sigh as he murmured something unknowingly, "The...rose..." 

_He looked at his surroundings inside his own head the dank recesses of memory and guilt and suddenly, something appeared. A woman, a faintly misty and translucent woman, one that looked vaguely familiar even. Her name. Whatwhat was it? Andnext to this woman, this mysteriously hazy but beautiful woman, was another one, someone younger. Someone with violet eyes and blonde hair and full of lifewho was she? _

He looked to one of the cracks in his walls. A name seeped from it, a name that fit the first face. 

And when he spoke it, it wasn't just in his head. 

"Rosie?" 

The woman had nodded, smiled, and stepped over to him. One hand, made of only air, reached out to him, and he reached out to it. 

and then she'd gone. Swallowed again by the surroundings of his own head. And the second womanthe second woman fought against the mist. But it was unbeatable, inevitable, and her fight was futile as she dissolved as well. He sighed, and somewhere was the faint hissing of the door snapping shut again, and then he went back to his sitting position, staring into nothingness. 

"She _was_ here," he answered himself after a moment, as a half-finished picture of a tall, gaunt and angry man formed in his mind. The torn edge of the paper the picture was drawn on was the end of his mind's eyes, but this one he recognized. Recognized very, very well"And Escher too..." 

**We do not know if Miss Griffin has seen you. If she did, we were suppressed at the time. **

"She was," he mumbled back. "She tried to help me, like Kat did." 

**We still do not understand why you wish to wait for Miss Morrigan and Miss Griffin. **He could see the actuators mentally frowning. 

"It's ahuman thing," he replied after a pause. "I justdo." 

They scoffed in his mind and fell silent as Otto tried to stand again. One of the lower tentacles helped him up, all four keeping his balance. He nodded his thanks and (with help) made his way to the door, observing it thoughtfully. He noted ironically that if it had not been coated in padding, it would have been remarkably identical to the one locking him in his mind. 

He could already hear the dissent of the actuators stirring in his mind. _Already. _He hadn't been out of his demented little world for an hour and already he was arguing with them. Some things never change. Like the poor straitjacketed scientist couldn't have an hour of peace with his creations. Sigh. 

Amazingly, as he finished the thought, they quietened. 

_Thank you. _

**You're welcome.**

He turned from the wall and lifted his arm to run his hand through his hair, which was dirty, limp, and absolutely filled to the brim with knots. The hand never got to its destination, however, and this probably had something do with the fact that his sleeve had fallen down to his elbow, revealing the connect-the-dot patterns that marred both his arms. 

"Oh..god," he breathed, running an arm over the other, hands sliding over the bumpy scars, "Whathappened to me?" 

So, this was why he couldn't remember. He had no idea _what_ had been put into his system, either. This was not looking good. He started to try and count the punctures, then gave up with a resigned sigh. The arms hissed their agitation. 

He closed his eyes, beckoning mentally to the actuators. They appeared besides him, and with slight smug satisfaction, ripped up any and all padlocks on that filing cabinet. He pulled open the drawers, pulling out the first file he saw and opening it. 

_"I'll kill you, Mereii"_

Mereii. 

He was why Otto was here, why he had so many punctures, why he'd hidden in the void of his mind, why he'd been socatatonic. 

"Dr. Mereii." he murmured, glaring up at the door. A new anger entered his eyes and he growled. The tentacles all rose around him, eagerly awaiting a command. Theirwell, bluntly, their _enjoyment_ of hurting and destroying things that hurt their Father hadn't faded in one bit, and after being inert for almost a year, it could be said that they were suffering for destruction withdrawal. They wanted to get rid this withdrawal. Quickly. 

**He hurt you, Father,**they murmured. 

_Yes. _he agreed. 

**We should hurt him back.**

_Not yet. _

Their clicking translated to angry growls. **Why, Father?**

It had occurred to Otto as he had remembered Mereii's name (and the threat) that even thinking about hurting another with the gruesome power of the actuators made him feel guilty. Even if this certain another happened to be a demented, needle-happy psychiatrist. 

**He hurt you, Father. **

We should hurt him in return. 

This makes sense. 

Doesn't it, Otto? 

He closed his eyes and shook off their hypnotic voices. He couldn't let them get to him, not again. _Yes, _Otto assured them. _But not like that. Never again like that, do you understand me? _

**Then how will we do it, Father? **

Can we do it? A pincer snapped for effect. 

The doctor tried to avoid thinking his disgust at his creations' enthusiasm. He shrugged and returned to watching the cell door with a yawn. 

**Can we help you, Father?**

"No, not right now. Justlet me be for a moment." 

Obligingly, the actuators fell silent. Within two more thoughts he was at that mental cabinet again, reaching into the already-open file and pulling out another memory. 

_Pain assaulted him. Brilliant white light searing into his head, originating from the upper left actuator connection. It was the sort of pain one got from picking at a scab and pulling it off, only emphasized a thousand times over. His entire shoulder seemed to have gone completely numb, but after a single, horrific second, he realized it wasn't his shoulder that had gone dead, it was the actuator itself. Forcing himself to slog through the pain, he saw a familiar face. _

"And they work excellently, I assure you." 

Mereii.again. 

He set the memory down and opened his eyes. 

**We should hurt.. **

Mangle 

Kill 

This Mereii. 

The doctor shook his head, and spoke with an amused smile. "I cannot believe I missed you." 

**Father!**They sounded insulted.**Without us, you would still be trapped within yourself.**

"You missed the sarcasm," he replied, smiling, shaking his head again. "Why do you have to be so." 

**Aggressive? **

Violent? 

Impulsive? 

Protective? 

"All of those things." He went back to looking at his scarred arms, running a hand through his hair. However, his hair was so limp and knotted that the hand couldn't get far at all, so with this failure, he sat down and began to work through the tangles as he waited for Kat and Escher to return. 


	9. Up and Out

It was nearly eleven by the time Kat finished with the paperwork. Far too jumpy to leave the vicinity of the asylum, the two girls had sat parked around the corner in Kat's increasingly chilly car all evening, Kat working on the forms that her boss had given her, and Escher trying to delay the onset of boredom by fiddling with the radio and drawing on the crumpled up pieces of paper that Kat tossed periodically into the footwell. She had related, in minute detail, what had happened in Otto's cell after she had left Escher behind in 709, and in doing so she had passed her nervousness about what might happen next straight onto the younger girl, who could now barely sit still. 

It was the doorlock that did it. It was a popup stud kind, and as Kat tried to concentrate on using the right terminology in the final paragraph of her amended report, a _ka-chunkka-thonk _sound told her that Escher had found it. The noise repeated itself, once, twice, three times, f- 

"LEAVE THE FUCKING LOCK ALONE!" 

Kat's yell was of startling volume in the enclosed space of the car, certainly beating the radio. Escher's hand dropped from the lock as if it had stung her, and she stared at Kat in shock. The older girl tried to conceal her surprise at her own outburst by looking down and shuffling through her finished papers, and for a while after that there was nothing but a brittle silence in the car, as the two young women stared out of their respective windows. 

"Sorry," said Escher, eventually. She was apparently addressing the passenger-side vent fan, but the word was clear enough. Kat sighed, and decisively shovelled all the loose papers into her case. 

"So am I. Come on." She opened her door and got out, waiting for Escher to do the same before locking the car with her keyfob remote and setting off down the empty street in the direction of the asylum. Escher caught up with her, giving her a look that doubled as a question. 

"Change of plan," said the psychologist, increasing her speed a little, sort of power-walking in fact. "Never mind this heap of crap," she gave her case a shake, "we're going straight up to Otto before we go anywhere else. In fact," as they turned the corner, the asylum looming into sight like a lurking and oddly angular dinosaur, "we're gonna make sure no-one sees us getting up there. I just have a feeling about this, as Chet might say." 

"What if someone does see us, though?" said Escher, somewhat breathlessly. What she was doing to keep up was more like uneven jogging. Kat gave her a sideways grin, pausing before the asylum's porch. 

"Well," she said, "you can always pitch another fit." 

The asylum's corridors were totally deserted as the two of them hurried through, filled with harsh light and the sort of spooky _wrong_ ambience that empty hospitals or schools or any other institutions generate when the people that give them life have gone for the day. It felt rather like being in a haunted anthill. 

"So they said they weren't sure if they could wake him up?" said Escher, eventually, as the lift doors slid shut behind them. 

"They said they'd try." 

The younger girl looked a little happier. "Oh, well, generally when the tentacles go all out _trying _to do something, it gets done." 

"Yeah," said Kat, "or it explodes." 

There was a silence. Then the lift dinged and opened, revealing the lonely expanse of the seventh-floor corridor. They set off again, and this time Kat found herself hurrying after Escher. 

"Listen, we have to take this carefully," she called, catching her up around the door of 705. "We probably shouldn't hope for too much." Kat made an uncertain gesture with her shoulders, thinking of when she had left earlier in the day, how the tentacles had been alive, nudging Otto slowly towards the path of remembrance. He would get there, she knew. She had faith in the actuators, as strange as it was to say, and faith in Otto. They together could do anything. 

Including throwing off a year's worth of trauma. 

But she still didn't want to raise false hopes, whether in her own mind or in that of her companion. Out loud she said; "The kind of state he's in, it might take _days _for them to bring him back. I should have brought a light, then I 

_WHUNNGG _

WHUNNGG 

WHUNNGG 

WHUNNGG 

Kat and Escher whirled, staring up the corridor to where, around the curve, they could just about see the heavy metal surface of the door to 712. It lookedoddly lumpy. Only for a moment, though. Then, with a massive, reverberating - 

_CLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG_

-the door simply shot upright across the corridor and hit the far wall, shaking the tiling beneath their feet and filling the air with plaster dust that shook out of the ceiling with all the enthusiasm of an indoor blizzard. Then, as the echoes subsided, they heard a voice through the floury fug. It was deep, angry, and fractured on every second or third word. For both Escher Griffin and Katarina Morrigan, however, it felt like the most welcome sound in the world. 

"I told you to wait FOR them, not-" A pause, then closer, "You know damn well what I meant!" 

Neither girl spoke. They just looked at each other, eyes alight, then turned as one and ran into the subsiding dust. 

Blinking hard, shielding their faces, they soon made out a human shape, standing in the (slightly enlarged) doorway of 712, his indistinct shape framed by four other shapes that were definitely not human. As the cloud thinned, details emerged, and Kat found her eyes drawn straight to the central figure. 

He was standing in the doorway, his head half-turned from where he had evidently been yelling at the nearest actuator claw. As he spotted Kat and her companion, he turned to face them, his hand reaching up to scratch an itch near the top of the neural ridges that ran up his spine. Yes, his arms were free, she saw, each draping white sleeve turned back and trailing a strap with an end that had been cleanly ripped from the buckle. 

Her eyes travelled upwards to his stomach, where it was clear to see the man had lost a bit of weight. Chest, arms, face 

two eyes of the deepest chocolate brown looked back at her. They were swathed in bags, both of the healthy, natural kind, and the unhealthy kind, the kind that one got from not sleeping enough. Those eyes were vividly mocha, barely flecked with nearly invisible crimson. They were wrinkled, but not in a bad sort of way. Framed by a thick, heavy brow on a well-set forehead, with lines upon lines creasing a forehead that was under a head of russetty hair that desperately needed to be washed, and not just washed, but conditioned and nursed back to health. 

The eyes, the nose, a slightly large nose that seemed a bit crooked, over a pair of clean-shaven lips that spoke, slowly. 

"Kat? Escher?" 

a pause. 

"OTTO!" cried Kat, running over and hugging him tightly. So great was the force of the hug that one tentacle had to stand behind him to keep him upright, "Otto! You're back! You're finally back!" She leaned her head against his shoulder. "I missed you so much!" 

He uncomfortably patted her back, "Yes, Kat, I'm here. I'm here as myself." 

"Oh my god Otto, I'm so happy you're back I mean... I... I. Oh god, I'm so happy I can't even talk straight!" She hugged him tightly, then looked at the actuators. "Thank you. " 

Otto smiled as he disengaged from his old-time friend. His eyes strayed to the other girl. "Escher?" he asked, half-amused. "I had no idea you were considering a career in psychology." 

"Never have, never will." Escher told him, with her brightest high-score pinball smile. 

"Then what are you doing here?" 

She took Kat's place as the resident Otto-hugger as she told him; "Saving you, of course. Isn't it about time I paid you back?" 

He grinned again, shaking his head, "You've gotten bigger. Both of you." 

"And you've lost weight," replied Kat with a smirk. "Are you feeling all right?" Her face smoothed over a bit as she asked, "Everything working up there in the Otto-brain?"

"I believe so." He stood back, looking at Kat and Escher with an expression which suggested he still wasn't one hundred percent sure he was really seeing them, which was probably the case. "It feels good to be back." 

"How long have you been awake', Dr. Octavius?" asked the younger of the girls curiously, watching him. "Long?" 

"Otto," he corrected vaguely. "Fully so?" He thought for a moment. "An hour or two? Can't be much more then that." 

"How did they get you back to normal?" Kat looked over at a tentacle. Otto followed her gaze, gave the actuator a private smile, and shrugged. 

"It's a secret...between us." One of the claws chirped apologetically to the two girls. 

"It's good to have you back, tentacle-boy," said Kat, beaming at him, "When I first saw you, I thought I was going to die."

Escher nodded in agreement, still looking up at the doctor. He made her feel younger, she realised, something which was going to take some adjusting to. Kat had known him as a young adult, more or less the same as she was now, but for Escher the five years between then and now had spanned one of the most packed and transforming passages of her life, and to suddenly feel fourteen again was, in a word, bizarre. "Sowhat have you been doing all this time?" 

"Thinking," he responded, a quiet chuckle in his fast-recovering voice. 

"About?" prodded Kat. 

Otto smiled at Kat, then closed his eyes, licked his lips, and began to recite: "Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose-garden. My words echo thus, in your mind." 

There were two pairs of polite clapping hands and a host of happy, screeching tentacles. "I used to know the whole thing." he said after a moment. "But not any more." 

"It'll come." said Kat. "Considering all the illegal crap that asshole shot you with, I'm ama-" She stopped, suddenly, awkwardly, remembering the memory that the actuators had showed her, and the deadly look on her friend's face as he had sworn revenge. Otto gave her a sharp glance, as if he knew perfectly well why she'd cut herself off. 

"Yes, where _is _John?" he said. "There's a few, ah, _points _we'd like to discuss with him." The upper actuators snapped open at the relevant word, hissing. 

Kat scanned his expression carefully for a moment, then grinned. 

A few minutes before Kat and Escher had heard the first impacts coming from 712, John Mereii had in fact been on the verge of leaving. At 11:07, certain that Katarina wasn't going to show up with her report that night (despite his order to the contrary, he thought, fuming, and it was clearly going to take some time before the irritating young woman understood exactly who was in charge around here) he had finally saved the mail he was working on and powered down his laptop. At 11:09, he was filling in the usual rotation forms for the staff's morning shifts, and at 11:16 he stood up, straightened his jacket, and crossed his large, severely tidy office to the door. Had he left right then, he would probably have been out of the building before anything untoward had a chance to happen. 

It was then, however, that Mereii made a mistake that he was probably going to regret for the rest of his life. He turned back at the light switch, as always, for a final check, and spotted that one of his diplomas was hanging crooked on the wall. Not a little, a lot. Almost twenty degrees off kilter, in fact. 

Mereii frowned, and walked back across his darkened office to straighten it. He guessed that it had probably been disturbed earlier, when the girl had had her attack and he'd had to supervise her lying on his floor for a good half hour, until she was able to breathe normally and looked a little less like a glue-factory candidate. In the morning, he intended to have a few words with Katarina about bringing physically disabled people onto the premises. It was asking for trouble. 

He adjusted the diploma carefully, and made to turn away. Immediately, a series of muffled but heavy reports thudded from somewhere overhead, and the frame slid slightly off level once again, this time accompanied by the ones above it. 

Mereii's nonplussed expression deepened as he pushed the frames straight with an index finger. _Fireworks, maybe, _he thought,_ or the construction site on the corner, that's three times I've had to ring up and c-_

The next impact made the room shake, and the diplomas bounced off their nails and clattered on the carpet, joining various other small items from around the room. This time, however, he ignored them completely, all his attention instead riveted on the bank of LEDs set under a neat dark-tinted shield on the desk. In the dark, most of them glowed a steady, reassuring green. Most of them. 

He walked slowly closer, drawn like a moth to a flamethrower. One light, one tiny, innocent LED, was blinking a vicious red. Blink. Blink. Blink. As Mereii stared, the redness and the blinking spread along the line, rapidly infecting the greens on either side until the entire seventh row of LEDs were pulsing on and off in smug scarlet harmony. 

Behind him, unseen, the wallclock snapped from 11:17 to 11:18. 

"OhGodno," said John Mereii, in one breath. Then he turned, snatching a small grey box from a shelf by the door, and sprinted from the room. 

Kat poked at the cell door's ravaged hinge, and stepped back quickly as part of it fell to the floor. "Gotta say, Otto, you still know how to make an entrance." 

Otto walked carefully up the corridor, his eyes scanning the ceiling. The actuators hovered anxiously around him, reaching out one way or the other at intervals to support him against the walls, but otherwise he was moving quite well on his own. "Don't blame me," he said. "_I _ wanted to be discreet. _They_ decided they knew better." 

Escher followed the doctor's searching gaze. "Uh, D- Otto, what are you looking for?" 

"Cameras." 

"Are there any?" said Kat. 

"No," said Otto, "but there'll probably be one in the lift, and definitely one in the stairwell." He shielded his eyes against the glare of the long fluorescent strip lights, his expression drifting inwards for a moment. Then, appropos of nothing, "Yes, and it's too damn bright in here anyway. Take it down a notch." 

The upper pair of claws darted upwards, in a fast staggered movement that allowed one to close around the glass shielding of the light and tear it from the ceiling, barely a second before the other arrived and propelled itself into the dark wire-spilling hole that this created in the polystyrene tiles. It buried itself up to the throat in the gap, bunching to worm itself deeper to the accompaniment of several serious-sounding _graunch_es and the zip and sizzle of breaking wires. 

"Careful," said Escher, nervously. 

"Don't worry," said Otto in a distant voice. He had his eyes shut, and seemed to be concentrating hard. "Is it blue for live and brown for earth, or the other way round?" Then he opened an eye and grinned at their stricken expressions. "Just kidding. We know exactly what we're doing." 

There was a solid, angry _ZZZWAT _from the hole, and the corridor was plunged into total darkness. A moment of utter silence, punctuated by a satisfied hiss -an incredibly eerie sound to hear in a pitch black void- and then the emergency power kicked in. One after the other, the remaining strip bulbs lit up with a pallid, slightly green glow (apart from one at the end which simply flipped on and off while making sad little _plunkplunk _sounds, as is the custom). Kat breathed a sigh of relief as she watched a still-intact-and-unelectrocuted Otto stepping back to withdraw his actuator from the ceiling. 

"That should take care of the cameras," he said. "Now, if w-" 

Footsteps clattered up the stairwell. Otto spun, three claws gaping in the direction of the sound, the other tentacle sweeping protectively around in front of Kat and Escher. A pause, and then the owner of the footsteps rounded the bend in the corridor and came into view, skidding to an abrupt halt not ten yards from where they stood. 

"-Hello, Dr. Mereii," Otto's tone was mild, conversational. "We were just talking about you." 

At the sight of Otto, standing calmly in the middle of the corridor (and nearly filling it, if you counted the bulk of his extra limbs,) Mereii's face went through a good half dozen expressions before finally settling for Stunned, with a side-serving of Utter Dread. For an instant his eyes flicked to Kat, who tilted her head and grinned in silent mock-apology. He took a step backwards, another, stumbled, then simply turned and fled like a man with the fear of God in him. Or, more accurately, the fear of tentacles. 

Mereii hurtled back down the hallway, slammed bodily into the door to the stairs and bounced off it like a window dummy hurled at a trampoline. He shoved at it frantically, thudded his palms against the unyielding surface, then froze as a quartet of _clanks _and a gradual rising rattle stirred the air right behind him. 

Very, very slowly, he turned. 

"That one's a pull', John," said Otto, as the actuators set him down barely two feet from his erstwhile tormentor. Inside his head, the voices were screaming in a sort of cacophonous harmony. 

**Him! **

That's him! 

Let us kill him, Otto! 

Please, Father, may we? 

Their host frowned, and shook his head slightly to clear it. He had forgotten how powerful their voices could be. Hypnotic and wheedling, they chipped away at his resolve, overpowering his senses until he felt almost drunk, lulled by their dizzying and reassuring words into a detached state where he could just stand apart and watch them act for him 

kill for him 

"No," he said, faintly, and then again, stronger. "No." He blinked till he could see straight and focused on the man in front of him, who was flattened against the door watching him like a gecko watches a cobra. 

**But, Otto-**

"_I said never again." _hissed Otto, in a voice so deadly that even the actuators fell silent, their claws closing and dipping in resignation. Relief flooded him, along with a renewed confidence in his own strength of will. He felt them making an effort to control their temper, and he knew that the control was tenuous, but nevertheless- 

Mereii, however, took the tentacles' submissive lowering as a sign that he was safe. He straightened up from his former cringing posture with a self-conscious twitch of his jacket, and smirked. 

"Hah. I _knew _y-" 

His sentence was terminally interrupted by the arrival of Otto's right fist. 

The two girls hurried up behind their friend just in time to see Mereii hit the door again, backwards this time. He slid down, landed heavily on his knees, then keeled over forwards. Spark out. 

"Wow," murmured Escher, after a moment. 

"You have no idea," said Otto, shaking some life back into his hand, "how satisfying that felt." He could hear the tentacles protesting in a cheated kind of way, but they didn't sound that angry; it had, after all, been a very good punch. 

Kat nodded grimly. "I think I can imagine." 

Another noise, this time from the opposite direction. The three turned just as Chet Karos emerged from cell 709, still struggling with his straitjacket. He'd gotten a sleeve over his head, but was evidently unable to move it any further without dislocating his shoulder. 

"A little help, Katarina?" he said, with as much dignity as could possibly be assumed by someone who appeared to be in the middle of an extreme yoga workout. Kat hesitated for a moment, then went across and started to unbuckle the straps that held his arms together. 

"You have to listen to me," he said, urgently, as soon she was finished. "If you want to escape without being seen, you have to-" 

"Sorry to butt in, but who the hell are you?" said Otto, sharply. Chet looked up at him, in an easy glance which took in the straitjacket and the extra limbs before stopping on his eyes. 

"Hello, Dr. Octavius," he said. "My name's Chet Karos, and I think I'm pretty much your only hope of getting out of here." 

Otto blinked at him, and above his shoulder an actuator parted its claw in a mystified _eeeek._ In the end, it was Escher that broke the silence, her footsteps loud on the plastery floor as she approached the precognitive patient. "Okay, Chet," she said, and her voice was nervous yet steady. "How do we do it?" 

For a moment, Chet looked taken aback. Kat, watching, realised that he had expected to have to fight to be believed, as he'd probably been doing for most of his life. Then he closed his eyes, rubbed his newly-freed hand across them, and straightened his head. 

"Right," he said. "Okay." 

There was a pause. 

"What's he-" started Otto. 

_"Shhh," _hissed Escher, who in truth had undergone something of a complete reversal of opinion since her encounter of that afternoon. Kat shot the bewildered doctor a quick I'll-explain-later glance, but before she could say anything, Chet started to talk. 

"You weren't seen, no-one saw you except for one for. _him _we have to we have to take him with us." he said, his arms lifting limply about two inches from his sides, the buckles clinking where they dragged on the floor. 

_"What!" _yelled three voices, in unison, accompanied by a quartet of angry rattles. Chet didn't react, apart from a slight crinkle that chased across his brow and then vanished. With his eyes closed and his long pale hands open like strange leaves, he looked frighteningly otherworldly as he stood there in the centre of the rubble-strewn corridor, swaying very slightly. 

"We need we need to go up one floor" he continued. "Not the lift, the stairs we need to go _now." _When they didn't move, his eyes snapped open for an instant, the green more vivid than Kat had ever seen it, blazing beneath the darkness of his pupils like ink in a well. "NOW!" 

His scream broke the spell. Kat started forwards, Escher following her and grabbing Chet's unmoving wrist as she went. Otto took one last look back up the corridor, the smart arms snapping round to scan the area, then turned after them into the stairwell, ducking instinctively to make sure the upper arms remembered to clear the top of the doorframe. Apparently as an afterthought, a tentacle snaked back through the doorway and grabbed Mereii by the ankle, dragging the unconscious doctor swiftly after it through the closing gap. 

The door swung shut. Seconds later, at the far end of the seventh-floor hallway, the lift dinged. 

In the stairwell, Chet suddenly stuck out an arm, which Kat almost fell over. "Stop," he hissed. 

They froze, and in the silence that followed they could hear every word that floated up from the corridor they had just left. 

_"You hear something?"_

A short pause. 

_"Nope."_

"You think it was a false alarm?" murmured Chet, making Escher jump. 

_"You think it was a false alarm?" _said the first voice from below. 

_"False alarm nothing. Look at all this, wouldya?"_

At this, Otto half-turned and gave his actuators an accusatory stare. 

_"Jesus, what were they keeping in here? The Incredible Hulk?" _

"I dunno, but it ain't here now." 

"Or" said the first voice, thoughtfully, _"maybe it _is" 

There was another, longer pause. 

_"I think we should go get backup." _the second voice said, eventually. 

_"I think that's a good idea."_

Fast-receding footsteps, the _ding _and _whoosh _of the lift. Then silence. In the stairwell, there was the sound of four people starting to breathe again. 

"That was quite something," said Otto, eventually. "How did he do that, exactly?" 

Kat prodded Chet gently. He had come to a halt with his face almost up against the stairwell wall, and didn't seem interested in improving his viewpoint. She leaned in a little closer and saw that his eyes were open, focused calmly on the plaster in front of his nose. Laying a palm on his shoulder, she was startled to feel the feverish warmth of his skin, radiating even through the cloth. He wasn't shaking in the slightest, neither was he displaying any other signs of sweating or tension. He was justsuperheated. Kat wondered if this was normal for him, or if this weird trance was harming him in any way. Even if it was, she decided, she had no idea how to snap him out of it. He certainly didn't seem in distress; in fact, this was the most tranquil-looking she'd ever seen him. The general impression was of _function, _of something in him that was busy doing what it had been created to do. "Chet sees the future." she said, matter-of-factly. "II think he's trying so hard to see what's going to happen next that he can't see what's happening right now." 

The doctor raised an eyebrow. "Well, that makes sense, I guess," he said. "Is he sane?" 

Kat scrunched up her nose. _"There's _a question. I don't think he's totally _in_sane, if that helps any." 

"Thanks for that vote of confidence, Katarina," said Chet. His return to life was as sudden as lightning, and every bit as startling. Grinning wryly at their expressions, he added; "It's room 816 we're heading for, and we need to hurry. This place is just about to get busier than Macy's over Thanksgiving. I-" He broke off, a worried frown clambering across his forehead, and shook his head heavily, like a bear with earache. " something isn't" 

"What is it, Chet?" said Kat, urgently. The man looked up at her, his gaze confused yet intent, as if he was searching in her face for the answer to a riddle that was hidden there. 

"Proof?" he said, slowly. 

"Proof?" repeated Kat, mystified. 

For a moment, there was silence as everyone looked at Chet. He looked confused, which put a terrible feeling in Kat's stomach. Confusion and Chet did not often go togetherShe shook off the thought. 

"Why room 816?" Otto asked suddenly from behind then. An actuator chirped 

"That's where it is" Chet trailed off. His voice was decidedly unsure, and this unsettled the two girls (who knew all about Chet's inability to _not_ be sure) greatly. Neither of them wanted to solidify the insecurity that was seeping off the precogniscient man, but of course there _was_ one other present who was conscious, and he was as curious if not more then the two girls. 

"What is it?" 

Chet turned to Otto and shrugged. "I don—" He started, then cut himself off, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. "It's important." 

An actuator chirped next to Otto's ear, and he shrugged, opening his mouth to question again. He hadn't formed the first syllable when he noticed Chet was halfway up the stairwell. Kat and Escher followed, and Otto was last, dragging his unconscious captive behind him. It was likely that Dr. Mereii would remain in this state for quite some time, given how each time Otto climbed a step, John's head flopped against said step. He was going to have a wonderful collection of bruises on the back of his skull to show off when he awoke. 

"I wonder why we're going _up_ for this thing," Kat said vaguely to Escher, who didn't quite get the reference. She was, after all, an artist, and not a psychologist. Off Escher's look, Kat explained. "The higher floor you get, the worse the patients." 

"Star's not a bad patient." Escher replied, now even more confused than before. 

"Star is inexplicable. As is Chet. And Otto. Seeing a pattern?" 

A sudden understanding dawned on the younger girl's face and she nodded. 

As they strode across the hallway, a sudden _thud_ in cell 812 made Escher and Otto jump. Chet was back to his normal calm self and said nothing, just looked that way and shrugged. Kat, as she had said many times over, was very good with dealing with creepy things and people and therefore was very good at hiding her creeped-out-ness. Because she was also very creeped out and didn't show it. But that was besides the point. 

The motley crew stopped in front of room 816, eyeing the door. Doors, actually, as there were two 816(a) and 186(b). 

"B." Chet said. He tried the door, for the hell of it, but knew (of course) it was locked, "Dr. Octavius, if you would?" 

Otto looked the door. It was the same as every other door in the hallway, the same bleak steel with white observation window, the window now shut. An actuator rose up as he pulled his shoulder back, and then both released. 

Steel window-covers and thrice-reinforced glass was nothing to the actuators of Otto Octavius. The tentacle slunk inside. 

".of course there's no handle!" Otto said suddenly. Kat_ did _jump this time, with Escher. It took a second for both of them to realize the same thing as there was pause and he spoke again, "They're not _supposed_ to get out!Idiots." 

All three of the other humans, this time, exchanged weird glances as Otto struggled with the door. The actuator behind it extended its full thirteen feet and pummelled it forward. After vicious beating, the door simply fell to the ground in front of them, and Otto, Kat, Escher and Chet walked inside the dimly lit room. 

The room was, as already said, dark. There was nothing but a few lamps and such here and there. The most distinguishing thing about the interior was that the floor was hardwood. Three of the walls were padded, as was the ceiling, but the floor was hardwood and there were outlets in it. And the last wall, the one opposite from the door, was mostly surrounded by a wide, glass window - which, amazingly, didn't look as strong as the observation ones. It was a wide, circular window, and looked more like it would fit in a living room rather then an insane asylum. Three of these outlets were filled up, and one was half-full. Escher traced the cords with her eyes to the various lamps and finally to the only thing of value as Kat stared at the floor. 

"Kat!" she called. "It's a computer!" 

Kat's head snapped up and she rushed over to look. A sleek silver laptop sat upon a cheap wooden desk with a spinnable padded chair. The laptop was open, and the light of it reflected against the padding on the back wall. As if it would attack them, she and Escher crept over quietly, the older of the two sitting down. Otto simply dropped Mereii on the floor so all four actuators and himself as well as Escher could peer over Kat's back. 

Chet, meanwhile, was staring out the window, his face twisted in concentration. "Shit" he swore softly, turning to the rest of them, who were sifting through the files, their expressions getting more and more bored by the minute.

"There's nothing here, though there probably _was_," Kat said with a resigned sigh. "And I think whatever _was_ here, was _majorly_ important. I mean, I don't know why else he'd keep it in here." 

Escher nodded distractedly, wandering over to a cyan box in the corner. She flipped it open, revealing steel machine tools. Frowning, she pulled out the first layer of tools in foam moulding, revealing a second layer of tools underneath. 

"Hey, guys, what do you think these were for?"

"What are you talking ab- oh." Otto turned and peered over Escher's shoulder. The actuators chirped behind him, sullenly. 

"What did they say, Octavius?" Chet asked, and if the expression in his eyes meant anything, he already knew what Otto was going to say. 

"Mereii used _these_ tools to make the inhibitor collars." 

A sudden realization from the girl on the computer; "Because the actuator plans _were_ on this computer, but when they were done, he didn't need them anymore. I bet he put them" Her sentence faded off, her voice sickly. 

"On his other computer," Chet finished. 

"Which is" 

"Downstairs." 

"The place where all the cops are," she said weakly. "And we have to get this?" 

He nodded firmly, green eyes burning. 

"Andyou're _absolutely sure_." 

"Katarina, have I led you wrong yet?" 

Otto looked at the two of them. "We should send as few people as possible. Chet knows what he's doing, so that automatically includes him. And—" 

"Katarina will come with me," Chet said calmly, looking at her. She looked on the verge of freaking out, but thankfully didn't. 

"Chet, if something REALLY important doesn't happen with this laptop, I am _so_ going to kill your ass." 

He smirked back at her. "Yes, I know that." 

Kat sighed, palmed her forehead for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. Come on." 

The seventh floor was still deserted when Kat and Chet passed it, the flickering emergency lighting splitting their shadows against the stairwell as they walked quickly down towards the sixth. Chet, Kat noted as he paced ahead of her, looked a lot calmer than she felt, which reassured her a little. Halfway down the next flight, he turned to her, his voice barely above a whisper. 

"The power's on a floor-by-floor failsafe, so past here the cameras are working," he said, pausing right in front of the fifth-floor door. 

"As long as you can see how we do it, I don't care," said Kat. Chet looked pained, and shook his head. 

"Katarinathis is hard to explainI can't see how we do it _right."_ He waved a hand hurriedly as Kat opened her mouth. "It's likeI can see how we could get caught, how we might go wrong. So it works out the same. See?" 

"No." 

"Look, trust me. I don't know how or why it works, but it does. As long as we do the opposite of what we could have done, we'll be fine." 

Kat blinked at him. "Chethow the hell are we going to get past _security cameras _without being seen? If there's one place that's going to be popular right now, it's the security booth. There's a screen" 

He grinned at her. "Oh, that part's easy. We just follow the golden path." 

"The _what?"_

"You'll see." 

Kat shook her head. Whatever Chet was talking about, she thought, it sounded utterly crazy- but if she had learned anything by this stage, it was that craziness was relative. And, she had to admit, there was something about Chet in this frame of mind that inspired confidence. 

"Show me," she said. 

Chet nodded, took her hand, and stepped through the door. 

There was no-one visible in the corridor, but Kat looked up instinctively to the nearest corner and saw the dark glass eye of a camera, aimed straight at her. She didn't have time to react, however, because as soon as they were through the doorway Chet set off at a brisk stride, towing her after him. He reached the bend in the hallway and stopped, waiting for a handful of seconds before setting off once more, this time in a diagonal that fetched them up against the lift doors. Kat saw another camera directly above their heads, and gulped. 

"Chet," she said, as calmly as she could, "please explain why you just dragged me past two working cameras. Now, before i kick your head in for all the nice people downstairs to see." 

Chet laughed, and pushed the lift button. "The cameras work on a rotation," he said. "They switch, in order, from one view to the other. They don't move, and they never change the pattern. And if we can use that pattern, we can walk straight past the cameras and never be seen once. That's the golden path." 

There was a moment of silence as Kat thought this over. "Sothat can't see us." she said, staring up at the glassy eye. 

"Nope. We're in its blind spot. And the other one saw us, all right, but its feed wasn't in use while we were there." He closed his eyes for a moment, then took hold of her wrist and pulled her backwards, halfway down the right-side wall, and into a recess that held a desk and a chair for a duty orderly. She copied him as he flattened himself against the wall, still explaining under his breath. 

"We're in luck, Kat. This building isn't as well-protected as you'd expect. There aren't enough cameras, and the timing's lousy. If I was feeling uncharitable I'd suggest that someone's beenwith the security budget." 

Kat smirked. "Great. But, uh, why are we going to use the lift? I mean, if there's a camera in there, surely it's way too long-" 

"Oh, the lift wasn't for _us."_ said Chet, pressing further back against the wall. "It was for _him."_

"Wh-" 

_Ding._

The footsteps started even before the swish of the door stopped, indicating that their owner was in an almighty hurry. Kat felt her breath seize in her throat as the armed policeman thundered past the recess, looking neither left nor right, his gun drawn. His tread echoed around the bend, then faded away. 

"I thought that might get his attention." said Chet, the shock of his voice next to her ear drawing Kat's attention to her own temporary lack of breathing. She gasped to catch up, glaring at him. 

"Thatwas astupid risk." 

"No, it was a _necessary _risk. The _stupid_ risk would have been to do what we're going to do now," and he suddenly stepped out of the alcove and started off back in the direction the policeman had taken, pulling her after him, "to go downstairs, while he was still down there waiting for us." Pausing at the bend, waiting for the cameras to perform their invisible switch, he looked back to her and smiled. 

"Don't worry, Kat. There's only four floors to go. We'll be fine." 

Six minutes and thirty-nine seconds later, Kat wasn't feeling any more relaxed about her position. Her position, specifically, being crammed behind a locker halfway along an empty corridor, completely on her own, having just gone through what had felt like the most nerve-racking few minutes of her entire life to date. Evidently, Chet had a somewhat abnormal definition of the word fine.'

A low whistle echoed from somewhere ahead of her, and she squeezed out from behind the lockers and hurried down the hallway, heart pounding, wishing for the tenth time that minute that she had at least two more pairs of eyes.

Suddenly, an arm shot out of a half-open door to her left, causing her to nearly bite her tongue off as she clamped down on her first impulse to yell. It grabbed her wrist before being followed by its owner, who grinned at her and pulled her into Mereii's office.

"There, we made it," Chet said, letting her go and padding further into the quiet room. Kat allowed herself a second to recover, closing her eyes and trying to get her pulse down from a whine to a more appropriate beat, then followed him.

"Yeah," she replied, heading straight to the desk in the centre. "Probably only took about five years off my life, too."

The laptop was exactly where she had expected it to be, turned off but still open on the desktop. Kat took a moment to disconnect the cable, then snapped the lid down and hefted it under her arm.

"Okay, ready." she said. Chet, who had been poking in a random filing cabinet, looked up.

"Mm?"

"I said, I got it, let's go."

"Look at this," said Chet, distantly. He had pulled a thick file binder from the cabinet, and now he was flicking through it, absorbed. From where Kat was standing, the words CN(In) KAROS, C were just about visible, printed in neat capitals on the spine.

Kat made an impatient nervy sigh of a noise, walked over, and looked. Then she blinked, and squinted.

"Is that_you_?" she said, after a moment.

Chet nodded.

Kat stared at the passport-style photograph, stapled neatly to the top page of the file. "You lookdifferent." _Younger_, she might have said, but that would not have been tactful. _Sane_, that was another option, but again, that could (and probably would) be taken the wrong way.

"Yes, well, this place isn't exactly the ultimate rest cure," he said, dryly, still turning pages. "You don't have to guard your words with me, Katarina. I'm not as crazy as you think I am." He snorted. "I know you don't agree with me."

"You don't help." She looked up at him, and his eyes met hers. She was startled to see that the familiar edge of the razor blades gone from their emerald depths. He looked tired, suddenly, drained by some old anger.

"I couldn't turn it off." His voice wasn't so much a protest as it seemed defensive, as if he was trying to clear his own name from some crime.

"What?"

He looked back down at the file for a moment before he spoke. "When he" He cocked his head at the binder, presumably to indicate Mereii, "first assessed me, I was still open to the possibility that people like him might be able to help me. I told him a lot of things, a lot more than I should have. He decided that he might be able to _profit_ from mytalents, and convinced some people, experts, to see me - I warned him against it, but then, of course, I'm crazy." He shook his head. "Anyway, they were also veryscientific. Ran tests, scans, you name it, then unanimously rejected the results. Insisting that I couldn't be precognitive. Insisting that I must have known something, been told something previously. They didn't like the idea of a nutcase that they couldn't _analyze_. So they told him, chewed him out for wasting their time. You can probably guess what happened next."

He pulled back a sleeve to reveal puncture wounds beyond number. Not as many as Otto had, but still more then enough to make Kat pale and gasp silently as she looked at them.

"Ironically enough," Chet continued, rolling his sleeve back down, leaning on his hands on the open filing drawer, eyes glinting with that familiar hard edge, "it only made my abilities stronger. I could predict more, with surprising accuracy - without the extra medication, I could have never told you that you'd save Otto, for example, let alone have seen how to get us down here safely. But it also killed my ability to turn it off."

"Turnwhat off?"

"You see it in my eyes, don't you, Katarina? The hardness, the coldness. The sort of green that poisons you. I could wear and remove that look as I chose, once. AfterwardsI lost the ability to turn it off and on." He blinked again, the daggers flashing before his eyes reverted to sparkling green diamonds. "Soit was both a blessing and a curse. Can I hate him for it? No, I suppose not."

Kat opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted. "But I _can_ hate him for sticking me in a rubber room and a straitjacket. And I _can_ hate him for forcing hours of so-called therapy' on me, although he mostly came out more disturbed then I did, so" He paused, unable to resist a spooky grin. "I felt reasonably successful about that at least."

Chet shut the folder with a _fwap_, and stood there for a moment in silence, staring at the neat beige of the cover. Something about his bitter thousand-yard-stare made Kat feel compelled to stand up for not so much her profession as the human race in general.

"We're going to get out of here, Chet." she said, on impulse. Chet blinked, and looked at her unguardedly for a second before his creepy grin returned at full strength.

"I know."

The duo scurried out, ducking into areas behind columns and against the walls, avoiding police and the (as Kat fondly dubbed them) psycho-SWAT-ninjas. They dodged and ducked and weaved and thankfully, went unnoticed.

Until the eighth floor stairwell, at least. As Chet climbed the metal steps, careful not to make a sound, Kat followed. He moved briskly, and she had no choice but to follow at the same pace. On the third step, she tripped, CLANG reverberating through the stairwell. Kat cursed loudly under her breath and Chet cast her an angry glance. What made both of them go wide-eyed was the way that the laptop bounced from Kat's gasp and fell down the steps with an extremely loud chorus of bangs and clangs. As if to laugh at them, fate decided that one of the psycho-swat-ninjas decided to open the door to the stairwell. He heard the clangs and looked up, but he couldn't get a clear view of the girl with the blond shock of hair that grabbed the plastic grey thing.

He reached for his walky-talky at the same time she got the thing, and they ran upstairs as his own backup ran after them.

"Okay, we have to go, NOW!" Kat shouted, running into 816 and holding the laptop as she jumped onto Otto's back. The doctor staggered slightly under the weight and Kat grappled to hold on to the laptop and Otto at the same time. After a while, Escher took the laptop for her.

"Chet," Otto said hurriedly. The boy was staring at the doorway, not acknowledging the doctor. "Take Mereii and let my actuator wrap around you. Escher, I'll carry you in my arms with the laptop."

Chet looked like he'd prefer the police to hauling John's body around as he pulled the KO'd psychiatrist up and held him. And actuator wrapped around them both. "You _so_ owe me," hissed the precog.

"I could always leave you here," replied Otto sarcastically. Chet shut up, but a tentacle shrieked so loud that the girls both winced. The reason was clear to all: booted footsteps coming near. Otto and the three remaining actuators took off once the doctor had gathered Escher in his arms. She herself clutched the laptop. An actuator slammed into the window, shattering the glass, and the doctor climbed, heading upwards.

A brisk wind blew eight stories high, making Chet and Otto gasp slightly . Kat realized that she could probably count on her fingers the minutes of fresh air the patients had gotten during their separate incarcerations in the rubber rooms, and understood the gasp. Otto ordered the actuators to be quiet, so they scaled fairly silently to the roof.

"Where do we go?" he asked quietly.

"We could- no." Kat frowned. "I have a roommate."

Otto nodded as they sailed through the air. Escher glanced back to notice the police glancing out of the eight floor Sporlock window, but they apparently couldn't see the bundle of arms, legs and tentacles flying through the air.

"We could go see my sister," Chet offered.

"Does your sister live with anyone?" Escher asked.

"She didn't six years ago."

Kat and Escher exchanged looks with the doctor over his shoulder. "Escher?" Otto asked.

"Uh, I have an apartment alone- 'cept Jelly"

"Jelly?"

"Er. My cat."

Otto's wrinkles in his forehead soothed. "Oh. Okay. Can we go there?"

Escher looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded.

"Direct me." the doctor ordered.

She did so. 


	10. Reversal

_Hssss._

Star padded out into the silent corridor, looking around him with frank curiosity. His restraint sleeves hung free, simply untwisted from their cross-pattern- the straitjacket hadn't been invented yet that could hold Star if he decided that he didn't want it to. 

"Kitty?" he called, after a moment. He looked both ways again, careful as a boy scout poised on the edge of a busy road, then picked his way across the rubble in front of Otto's empty cell and headed towards the stairs. 

"Kiiiiiiiiittyyyyyyyyy?" He leaned over the stairwell, his shaggy blond hair falling curtainlike across his eyes. He huffed at it and looked down through the centre of the winding stairs, moving his head back and forth so that the multi-layered glimpses of steps and handrails in his field of vision shifted dizzyingly. There was no telling how long he might have remained there, playing with this interesting viewpoint, if he hadn't been interrupted. 

A door banged, a couple of floors below. Four shadows, fluttering racing shapes against the sharp angles of the stairs, started to clatter up towards him. Large shadows, heavy footsteps. 

In one quicksilver movement Star grabbed the handrail and swung one-handed across the void, catching a foot on the opposite wall to propel himself into the recess of the eighth flight. He slipped into the narrow space like a batter sliding home, and lay still. 

Four men ran into view beneath, moving in a close, practised formation. They weren't wearing white, but they _did _have guns. 

Star's eyes narrowed. He remembered guns. Stealers and guns often went hand-in-hand. 

"Move out." said one man, dropping onto one knee to hold the door open for the others, who filed past and fanned out into the seventh-floor corridor. The first then turned slowly, covering the stairwell with his weapon, then backed through the doorway. It closed behind him, and the stairwell was empty again. 

Star waited a moment, drawing a wonky line through the thick drifts of dust bunnies that filled the recess with one idle finger. _If stealers like that are running around loose, _he reasoned, _Kitty can't be here. But it's her job to be here, so there has to be a really really really good reason why she isn't._

Still thinking hard, Star wiggled out of his hiding place and landed, catlike, on the steps. There was a decided breeze coming from somewhere above, shifting and freshening the stale antiseptic air, and he followed the feel of it on his face up to the eighth-floor hallway, around several bends, and through the battered doorway into 816(b). Hopscotching nimbly across the sparkling floor, his sock-clad feet somehow missing every single shard of glass, he crossed the deserted equipment room and leaned precariously out of the shattered window, peering hopefully out into the night. 

Outside, the mist hadn't abated. If anything, it had grown thicker, shrouding even the nearest buildings. For Star, the dense pallor of it was too close to the memory of his cell for comfort. He wanted, _needed_ to see the night sky, but he couldn't even see two metres in front of his face. 

He drew back and looked towards the door, shaking his head a repetitive, worried motion. The simple fact was that he knew nothing of the Sporlock Institute's layout, having never seen anything in it except the six walls of his cell. It was all entirely new to him, and so far it was striking him as definitely not fun. He was just as lost in this strange building, with its unpleasant sterile air and mysterious armed men, as he would be out there in that clammy mist. It seemed an impossible choice, and as he tried to make it his expression got more and more hopelessly anxious, like that of a child left alone in a supermarket. 

Whole minutes ticked by. Star stood in the watery light from the window, thinking harder than he had had cause to for a very long time. It had been easy for experts', from a cursory examination, to label his fragmented thought processes simple or dulled, but in fact this couldn't be farther from the truth. Star's head contained a world as bright and flaring as a Fourth of July sky. 

Kitty was out there somewhere, and maybe she was in trouble. Maybe, even, she needed his help. And there was something else, too 

No matter what, he knew that beyond the stairs and the walls and the fog, out of sight but _still there,_ was the sky. And _them._

Star smiled. Now the look on his face was rather more like that of a child left alone in a supermarket in control of a hefty, easily-accelerated trolley. He edged up to the very brink of the shattered windowsill, craned up to touch the top of the frame with both hands, then twisted his body so he was leaning backwards out over the drop, wrists crossed to take his weight. Tilting his head, he squinted up through the swirling vapour and saw something in the brick, only a couple of handspans above the frame. 

A crater, clawed out of the brick, surrounded by detailed patterns of cracks that clearly showed the strength of the thing that had made it. Another similar shape was just about visible, several feet above that. 

Three-pointed stars. 

Star uncrossed his wrists, reached outside until his fingers found the crater, and started to climb. 

"I'm _not _lost!" 

"I never said you were." 

"You're thinking it, though!" 

"Escher," said Otto, with considerable restraint for someone who had spent the last hour clambering across a succession of mist-shrouded rooftops while carrying a lot of uneven weight, "I'm trying to climb vertical surfaces with three actuators, which is pretty much the equivalent of having one arm tied behind my back. I'm _thinking _about not sending us all plummeting to our deaths. I'm _wondering, _however, why every time I ask you which way we're supposed to be going, you go tense, look worried, then point in what I can't help thinking is a random direction." 

"I'm sorry!" said the girl, leaning out over Otto's grip as she tried to pick out something familiar through the mist. "I just don't usually have to find my apartment from the sky-_there! _Right there! See, the roof with the satellite dish with the Roswell sticker on it!" 

In the fog, everything sounded muffled; Otto's feet barely made a sound as he touched down on the rooftop of Escher's moderately high apartment building. He set Escher down carefully, while behind him the actuator that had been acting as a carrier dropped Chet and Mereii, flexing its claw stiffly. 

Kat, sliding off the doctor's broad back, saw the stiffness of the movement and likened it to the slightly fixed quality she'd noticed in Otto's expression. He had carried them all and moved as fast and as well as she remembered he could, and it was only now that she realised how much effort and energy this must have taken. In typical Otto fashion, he was wearing himself out, overtaxing muscles and machinery that had been barely alive for almost a year, and she was glad for his sake that Escher had managed to deliver. It was strange- in thirty-three minutes and fifty-six seconds, Kat's life had dropped into the level of running and hiding from people again, and though there was a certain amount of awesome excitement and adrenaline involved, it kind of got on one's nerves a lot, especially when one had more classes to go to and probably shouldn't have been missing them like she had started doing. It was _so_ out of the question with Mereii and Chet and Otto here. 

"Otto!" Escher said from the doctor's arms. "Take me to the ground and I'll open the window. It's on the east wall." 

Otto nodded and scaled the wall downward, eventually reappearing Escher-less. Collecting the others, he climbed down to the window, and after a few minutes, the assembled group outside saw the door open and Escher do an Olympic-class job of hurdling over her random junk and opening the pane. The rest of them climbed in as Kat let go of Otto's back to take the laptop from the counter that Escher had set it on. She let it rest there as the actuator released Chet and John, though Chet landed on his feet and Mereii fell to the ground with a _thwump_. 

"What do we do about John?" Kat asked to the rest, looking down at the unconscious figure. 

"Make sure he doesn't get away," Otto replied darkly. 

"Yeah, _how_?" 

"I'll go see if I have some rope or something," volunteered the other girl, as she dashed out again. 

Chet slinked out behind her, leaning in the doorframe. "Check the pile in the back left corner of the room, on the very bottom," he suggested, pointing for reference. 

Escher moved a pile of stuff and basically disappeared under another pile of stuff, ruffling things. "Oh!" Her voice was muffled by the supplies. "There's a mattress down here too!" 

"You have a _mattress?_" was Otto's slightly incredulous response. "What do you_ do _with all this stuff?" 

"Artsy things?" Kat guessed as a frizz of purple hair appeared from the depths of the room, pulling itself up to reveal the rest of Escher Griffin. Said Griffin was currently struggling to get what was apparently a mattress out from the mountain of stuff. 

She was greatly facilitated by three actuators, who almost pulled _her_ off the ground with the mattress. 

"Where do you want this?" 

Escher took a moment to regain her balance (or what balance she had) and looked around, "Um, in that clear space over there. It can be Chet's bed, I guess." 

"Thank you, Escher." Chet said, already standing near in area Escher had indicated. Otto dropped the mattress, and almost immediately the precog fell on it, yawning. 

"What time is it?" 

"Too late for my good," said Kat darkly. "Like midnight. I am going to bed. Escher, got any idea where I can sleep?" 

"Is the couch okay?" 

"At this point in time, I don't really _care_." She trudged over to the couch, kicked off her heels, undid her hair, and flopped onto it. 

"Night," she mumbled vaguely and buried herself in the couch. 

Otto and Escher blinked at each other. Escher was holding something which might have once been part of a sculpture, an involved curl of steel with a length of chainlinks hanging from one end. She jumped slightly when a claw curled around her shoulder and took it out of her hands. 

"Sorry" she said, automatically. "Itit's been a while. You know" 

"Since the last time I showed up and turned your life upside down," said Otto, pausing in the act of dragging Mereii across the living room floor by a claw around one ankle. "I know, and actually, I should be the one apologizing to you. I think I gave you the wrong impression when Icut contact, Escher. It wasn't because of anything you did." He made a vague gesture, which metaphorically indicated events beyond his control and also prompted a couple of claws to wrench the links of the chain apart. Extemporising upon his intent, one claw looped the chain securely around a water pipe that led down to the skirting board in the corner of the room. The other re-bent the end of the chain around Mereii's left wrist, then picked him up and tossed him into the corner as if he was a bag of laundry. 

That done, Otto continued. "There were thingswell, let's just say I _had _to, to make sure you stayed out of danger." He smiled, tiredly. "You may have noticed, I'm not exactly the safest person to know." 

Her sleeve was slowly being folded over on itself between her antsy fingers. Soon, it was going to be shorter than her elbow. "I just didn't want you to think I forgot...I mean, you saved my-" 

"Ah, but you didn't forget. You came back, you helped me. It's been six years, Escher, and you're so differentbut I could never have imagined you'd be so much the same." 

Escher looked up, sharply. Then, on impulse, she stepped forwards and hugged him. He responded instinctively, her slight body against his chest sending the years falling away as - for a second between heartbeats - he could nearly see the bright red-and-gold blur of that theatre, that night, almost hear the hushed tide of voices in the huge, echoing space. 

He let her go. In his head, the voices stirred anxiously. 

**Otto? What is wrong?**

_Nothing. A vivid memory, that's all. _

**That is understandablethere is still a high level of re-association activity throughout your frontal lobes. It should settle down to normal, quite shortly.**

"Are you okay?" Escher was asking him, clearly worried by the vacancy in his eyes. He blinked and refocused on her, appreciating the contact, her concern. 

"I'm fine." He stood back, stretching his shoulders, yawning. "I think I just need some fresh air. It's been a long night." 

She grinned at him, as easy to convince as he remembered. "Sure. Just don't let the window shut, or you're gonna end up sleeping on the roof." 

Otto laughed. Escher didn't need to know that he wasn't planning on coming back that night. There were a few things he had to do first 

"Goodnight, Escher." 

Dawn came, blazingly sunny, bursting through the fog of the previous night and promising a blistering morning. The cavernous main room of the top-floor apartment belonging to Escher Griffin, however, remained resolutely dark as the sun rose, long blackout blinds uncharacteristically drawn (the result of a lot of wobblingly risky work with a chair and a hooked pole the night before.) 

At around six, however, a single sunbeam broke triumphantly into the room, slanting through a small hole in one of the blinds, a scorched little aperture that looked suspiciously as if someone had once trained a magnifying glass on it. The golden, strengthening glow crept across the floor, picking out various details of furniture, ornaments, books, and sleeping bodies, before it finally reached its destination and struck Katarina Morrigan full in the face. 

On its own, the beam would have hardly been enough to pull her out of such a deep sleep - she had, after all, managed to get through at least sixteen types of alarm clock during the last year alone - but on this particular occasion she was already halfway awake. This was because, for the last three and a half minutes, someone had been poking her in the head. 

Slowly, she opened her eyes. Dazzled by the sun, she squeezed them shut again and turned her head on the sofa cushion, then tried again. This time, the result was a very close-range view of a pair of bright blue eyes, half-masked beneath a drenched blond fringe. 

She screamed. 

The eyes and the fringe dropped momentarily from view as their owner shot backwards, nearly disappearing below the arm of the sofa. Kat sat up, her initial fright dissolving into stunned recognition. 

_"Star?"_

Apparently, the fact that her first reaction had been to scream at him didn't worry or offend Star in the slightest. As soon as she said his name, he snapped out of his defensive recoil, hooked his elbows over the arm of the sofa, rested his head on them, and grinned at her. 

"Hi, Kitty!" 

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Kat half-turned away, put her own head in her hands and hissed a few choice stress-relieving phrases under her breath. Star cocked his head, curiously. 

"Kitty?" 

"Star, how the _hell_ did you get here?" 

Beaming, Star held up a hand, his eye-wateringly double-jointed fingers outspread in an odd configuration. The thumb was on its own, but the index and middle were wrapped together in a pair, as were the ring and pinky. "I followed the three-pointers, silly. All the way over." 

Kat blinked. "You followed theright across the city? You climbed up here?" 

"Friend of yours, Kat?" said a dry voice. Kat spun to see Chet, sitting up on the mattress that Escher had found for him the night before, watching Star carefully. Star returned the stare, adding a friendly smile by way of interest. 

"Uhm," said Kat. "Chet, this is-" 

"Michael Jare-Toren, I know. I saw him being brought inabout three years ago, it would have been. It was quite an event." 

Vaulting over the arm of the sofa, Star landed crosslegged on the cushion next to Kat. "My name's _Star," _he insisted, though without rancour. Whatever it was that had made him go nuts at Escher, Kat guessed, Chet didn't have it. The precog nodded, harbouring a growing smirk. 

"And _Star _has a remarkable natural resistance to most sedatives, don't you? I couldn't see much of what happened through the window, but from what I _did _see I'd say it took him maybe five seconds to get his arms free, then four orderlies a good half hour to get him off Mereii and into the cell." 

Star looked up sharply at the name. "He's a stealer," he said, darkly. 

"Yes, and the next time he graced _my _cell with his presence he was a very foul-tempered stealer indeed. With one arm in a sling and an interesting collection of what looked suspiciously like bite marks." 

"What's going on?" 

All three turned this time. The individual standing in the doorway across the room was either Escher Griffin or Sonic's cousin. She felt their stares and forced the purple haystack atop her head into a slightly saner shape with her fingers. 

"I slept funny." she said, defensively. And then, finally registering Star, "Oh, my God." 

Kat decided it was time to take control of the situation. She got a hand on Star's shoulder as he started to rise and pushed him back onto the couch. "Remember what I said, Star? She's okay-" She stopped, then slowly removed her hand. "-And you'resoaked." 

"I'll, uh, get some clothes," said Escher, hurriedly, and, skirting the room with some speed, vanished into the kitchen and the storage room beyond. 

"Star," said Kat, urgently, "listen to me. This is important. Did anyone follow our tracks?" 

Star considered for a moment, wiggling a finger in his left ear, presumably to get the water out of it. He _was _drenched, and now she had a chance to see properly she noticed that both the elbows and the knees of his bedraggled white clothes were badly worn. He hadn't been kidding. Kat tried to imagine for a moment the kind of single-minded physical ingenuity and effort it must have taken to clamber, _sans _actuators, across half of the New York City skyline. 

"Yup!" he said. finally. 

A horrified look started to gel on Kat's face. "What? But_who? _Did you see who it was?" 

"Yup!" repeated Star, happily. "Me!" 

Kat opened and shut her mouth a few times, but to no avail. Behind her, Chet laughed quietly and padded away across the room in the direction of one of the windows. 

"Can't argue with that, Katarina." 

At that moment Escher re-appeared, her upper body hidden behind the combined bulk of two stuffed black bags. She paused in the doorway, teetered for a moment, then dropped the bags on the threshold. 

"I knew I still had this stuff somewhere," she said, off their stares. "Couple of years ago my friend Faye came up with the idea of starting up her own second-hand clothing store. She collected a ton of clothes, and then I think she kind of lost interest in the whole thing." Escher pulled a face. "When people see all the space I have here they generally end up asking to dump stuff in it. That's half the reason I don't have people around much." 

"And the other half?" said Chet, still gazing tranquilly out of the window. Escher flushed and started to concentrate on the knots in the second bag. 

"Uh, here, StarI thought this might fit you," she said after a moment, pulling out a folded red t-shirt and holding it out. Star, who had been perched on the back of the sofa throughout, looked at it suspiciously, then leaned across and took it with a rapid motion that was only a shade over from a snatch. He unfolded it, stared for a second, then slid off the back of the sofa and left the room. 

Kat watched him go, then turned to Escher, who looked crestfallen. "What was that about?" 

Escher sighed. "Oh, I don't know. I just thought he'd like it. I really don't understand why he hates me so mu-_uuuffff!"_

The sentence ended in a winded gasp, a direct result of the blaze of white and red that had just bounded back through the kitchen doorway and tackled her around the midriff. Escher had been leaning up against the sofa-back before Star cannoned into her, and his weight carried the two of them clean over it, landing the startled girl flat on her back on the cushions on the far side. Kat started forwards anxiously, but she stopped when she got her first good look at the shirt that Star was now wearing. It was bright scarlet, and there was a big printed gold star emblazoned across the front. 

"Thankyouthankyouthankyou, Stripy! You're the best best thingy besides Kitty and them!" Star said in one breath, from a distance of maybe two inches above Escher's face. Then he bounced off the sofa and started to poke at a precarious stack of books on the table in front of it. 

Escher picked herself up and stared imploringly at Kat, who shook her head and laughed. "Don't look at me. I'm willing to bet no stealer' ever gave Star a shirt with a star on before. My best guess is that you just included yourself out of that category. Plus got yourself a fan club for life." 

"Well, it's good to know I did _something _right." said Escher, smiling and feeling her ribs gingerly. "Though next time, remind me to wear protective padding-" 

A sharp intake of breath from the direction of the window made them all turn. Chet was stock-still, eyes screwed shut. The hand that was pressed against the windowpane faltered and came back to touch his forehead in a way that reminded Kat of his trance of the previous night. When he eventually spoke, the words were distant, considered. Almost as if, Kat thought, he was taking dictation 

"_where the hell am I?"_

No sooner did he speak, than a rustle of movement from the far corner turned all three heads to track it. Mereii was stirring, the hand that wasn't forcibly restrained clamped to the back of his skull as if trying to hold it together, eyes pained slits as he sat up against the wall. 

"" he croaked, eyes widening slowly, taking in the floor, the wall, the pipe, and -finally- the chain, his wrist and the connection thereof. There was a busy sort of pause, then his head snapped up, staring out across the room, aghast incomprehension stamping across his face. 

_"Where the hell am I?"_

A beat, and then Kat got up. 

"That'sclassified, John." 

For someone who had been knocked unconscious not eight hours before, Mereii was commendably quick on the uptake. His gaze flicked past her to Chet and Star (who were both watching him, now, with the avidity of a pair of razor-antlered deer who have just spotted the hunter's shoelaces are tied together) and he swallowed. 

"Katarina, what in Christ's name do you think you're doing? What-" The makeshift cuff clattered against the pipe, and he stared at it in disbelief. _"What the hell is this?"_

Kat folded her arms, raising a wry eyebrow. "Let's just say this is the reason why working late is bad for you." 

Mereii glared at her, then gave the cuff a couple of violent yanks that only served to prove that the human body was not designed to go one-on-one with tempered steel. "Let me go!" he half-screamed. 

"Well, I don't know" Kat turned to the two ex-patients at her side. "What do _you _think, guys?" 

"He's a _stealer!"_

"Thank you, Star. Chet?" 

The precog shrugged, casually. "I think there's a perfectly good river not far off. Good for dealing with dangerous refuse." 

"Hmm" said Kat, thoughtfully. To tell the truth, she was seriously enjoying playing along. As she had told Escher, she was not, as a rule, vindictive, butwell, every good rule had exceptions. "He'd float." 

"Not a problem." said Chet, looking around. He wandered over to something large, curly, and leaden that was propped up against the bookshelf, and hefted it, considering. "We could tie him to this." 

"Are you crazy?" yelped Escher, hopping up off the sofa as if someone had just passed a current through it. "You can't do that!" 

"Yes! Listen to her!" Mereii was watching them, head snapping from one to the next like a tennis-match-spectator who has spotted that the ball is a live grenade. 

The girl reached Chet and snatched the metal thing off him, cradling it protectively. _"This," _she snapped, "is my final project piece for this semester. Find something else!" 

Kat stifled a snigger. Mereii, she thought, looked very much like a property developer who had just been told that the five hundred acres of prime real estate he'd staked his business on was in fact ten feet below sea level. Escher had given him no reason to suspect her of being anything other than dead on his side, so the opposite turning out to be true was probably a heck of a culture shock for him. And if Kat had learnt anything about close-minded people through her relationship with Otto, it was that they did _not _deal well with culture shocks. Throughout her training, she had never felt happy with the idea that people could be quantified and predicted by solid psychological archetypes, but she had to admit that, right now, her boss was following the pattern exactly. It was known as the Fraser-Munbach model of reduced authority; subject used to control removed from said control and placed in hostile surroundings, subject becomes aware of the situation, subject passes rapidly through stages of shock and anger into rationalization and _then-_

"HELP! _HELP! _IN HERE! SOMEBODY _HELP_ ME!" 

-subject starts yelling their head off. 

"Shut _UP, _Mereii." she yelled back, as he paused for breath. Escher, however, looked remarkably unfazed. 

"Let him." she said, propping the statue-thing carefully up against the sofa. "The worst that could happen is that the guy downstairs turns his TV up a bit more. He's seventy-three and he's got a hearing aid the size of a tennis ball." 

"A soundproof prison," murmured Chet, who was still watching the suddenly-silent Mereii with great interest. "Doesn't _that _sound familiar? 

"Ah, geez, it's only six-forty," Escher rubbed the skin under one eye and yawned. "Kat, d'you think that chain's gonna hold till Otto gets back?" 

"If Otto made it, it'll hold." said Kat, with finality. "Trust me. The only way this asshole's going anywhere is if he takes the wall with him." 

"Okay, then" The younger girl yawned. "Uh, Chet, if you want to change as well, just look through the bags. I'm gonna try get some more sleep." 

"Good idea." said Kat. She watched Escher pick her way back across the floor and shut her bedroom door, then swung round on Mereii as she heard him take another deep breath. 

"Oh, and, John? Deaf guy or no deaf guy, if you start making that goddamn racket again I will personally gag you with uhwith _this,_ just to get some peace. Okay?" 

Her erstwhile employer looked at the rag that Kat had just swiped from a nearby litter of brushes. It appeared to be about thirty per cent cloth, the other seventy per cent a crusted mixture of oil paint and turpentine. His expression was all the answer she needed. 

"Great." 

Kat was woken at around lunchtime by the sound of a number of heavy books crashing to the floor by her ear. She groaned, rolled over, and fell off the sofa. 

"Whaa!" 

"Sorry! Are you okay?" Escher, her hair a damp purplish-treacle colour, arrived in her view, looking concerned. And dripping. "I didn't mean to wake you, but I have class in twenty minutes, I really have to go this time, my attendance is bad enough as it is, what with everything and stuff. There's things in the fridge - can you move? You're kind of lying on my books." 

"Whuh." agreed Kat, and moved. After a few minutes of watching Escher tear around the room, trying to be quiet, she had woken up sufficiently to add, "Is Otto back yet?" 

Escher paused, midway through lacing up one boot. The other was, as yet, undiscovered. "Nope." She waved a vague hand in the direction of the kitchen and the window they had used the night before. "Window's still open. Don't worry, though, I'm sure he's okay." 

"When're you gonna get back?" Kat blinked, and stood up. 

"Five, maybe." Escher finished stuffing things into her bag, and glanced up at her. She looked worried. "Do you think you'll be all right on your own?" 

"Escher, I'm trained to deal with dangerous people. I'll be fine." 

"I was talking about _him." _said the artist, flicking a nervous orange-spotted thumb in the direction of the far corner. Kat laughed, shortly. 

"So was I." 

After Escher had gone, a silence descended on the apartment. Kat made herself some toast, thanking her lucky stars that the kitchen wasn't anywhere near as untidy as the main room, then went and sat back down on the sofa to eat it. There was no sign of Escher's cat, though this probably had something to do with the number of strange people that had suddenly invaded the apartment. Star and Chet were fast asleep. Mereii was also asleep, sitting up against the wall with his head to one side. He was going to have an almighty stiff neck when he woke up, Kat guessed. 

She hung over the arm of the couch and browsed through some of the books that had been piled there. However, this particular stack were all in Latin or German (when selecting volumes for her library, Escher seemed to go by interesting visual contents/layouts, rather than whether she was going to be able to actually _read _the things) so she soon gave up. By the time fifteen more minutes had elapsed, having arrived at the conclusion that being on the run wasn't anywhere near as exciting as she remembered. 

Then, she slowly became aware of a new, distracting sound. It sounded like someone running a stick along a set of railings, except it was a lot more irritating. She sat up, registered that the noise was coming from the corner where Mereii was tied, and looked warily over. 

"Katarina. Kat." The links around Mereii's list were not quite long enough to allow him to get to his feet, but he was making up for it by rattling the makeshift metal restraint up and down the pipe, trying to get her attention. "Come on. I just want to talk." 

Kat sighed, and got up, picking her way across the room. She perched herself on the edge of a table, shifting a stack of half-finished sketches out of the way, and folded her arms. "All right. Talk." 

Mereii blinked irritably at her. His free hand was kneading gingerly at the side of his neck, fulfilling her prediction of an hour ago. "You're not doing yourself any favours, Katarina." he said. "Abducting people is a serious crime." 

Kat's eyebrows lifted. _"You're _talking to me about serious crimes?" 

Perhaps aware that he had gotten off to a bad start, Mereii shook his head, changed tack. "Be reasonable, Katarina. Try to think like a psychologist, for once." He shot her a shrewd look. "We're not telemarketers. There's no magic rulebook for our job. I did whatever I thought was justifiable to help my patients achieve progress." 

"What I saw you do to Otto was a long way off justifiable," snapped Kat, more than a bit nettled by the for once.' 

The psychologist spread his palms. "Sometimes, _everything's _justifiable." 

This somewhat sweeping statement elicited a not-entirely-surprised snort from the girl. "John, whoever it was that thought it was a good idea to give you authority over vulnerable people like that in the first place, they were really, I'd say _spectacularly, _wrong. It's practically my _duty_ to make damn sure you don't get a chance like that ever again." 

"Look, I'm not denying that, if viewed in a negative light, some of my methods might seem a little extreme. But believe me, in the long run, I had nothing but their best interests-" 

_"Their best interests?_ spluttered Kat. She would have added, _Don't make me laugh, _but before she could, she did. A lot. When she could speak again, she continued. "The best interests of your accountant, maybe. God, John, we were taught about people like you in our first year. You really never think about anyone besides yourself, do you? How the hell did you ever end up a psychologist? No, actually, let me guess. You were great in the exams, right?" 

_"I-understand-people."_ Luckily, this was an easy sentence to say through clenched teeth. After a moment, he recovered, and forced a smile. "And I know that you're under a lot of stress, Katarina. I'm sure if you just stop and think about this you'll realise. You're on the wrong side." He waved his free hand, indicating the rest of the room. "This isn't going to work, is it? Sooner or later the police are going to catch up with you, and when they do, _I'll_ be the victim, not your, ah, friends.' Think about it. Karos, Toren, they're both just as crazy as _he _is." 

"And Escher?" 

Mereii snorted. "Stockholm syndrome, Kat. Clear as day, and hardly surprising after what she's supposed to have been through. No, you and me, we're the only ones capable of being logical here." 

"You and me? You and me, John, do not even belong in the same _sentence. _If you're logical', I'd choose crazy' anyday." 

"You know, this is exactly the sort of ungrateful attitude I've come to expect from graduate employees!" snapped Mereii, his wheedling tone evaporating. "How many degree students do you think just walk into jobs in prestigious institutions like you did?" 

"John," said Kat, sweetly, "Sporlock is not a prestigious institution. Sporlock is Arkham on a shoestring." 

From the poisonous glare that this comment provoked, it seemed that she'd hit a nerve. When he finally continued, however, his voice had a low, carefully contained, and above all _persuasive_ quality. 

"Please, Katarina, think about it. We can do each other some good. Just help me, and I swear no-one will ever know you had anything to do with this. Help me get out of here, help me get these dangerous lunatics back where they belong." 

Kat stared at him, then turned and looked over to where two-thirds of the dangerous lunatics' in question were still fast asleep. Star was curled up on the other sofa, his skin pale against his new red shirt, his shaggy hair a bright halo around his young features. Chet wasn't far off, a tense-looking charcoal sprawl of long limbs and frizzy hair. It appeared that he had decided to take Escher up on her offer, and the nearly-new black longsleeve and scuffed black jeans that he'd found made him look even paler and lankier as he lay flat out on a spare mattress, as still as a waxwork. 

"We can do each other some good?" she repeated, slowly. At her sides, her hands were unconsciously increasing their grip on the edge of the table. 

Mereii nodded, eagerly, and gave her a conspiratorial, calculating smile. "And who knows? I might even let you keep your job." 

"AAUGH! Ahghh, you _bitch!"_

Chet snapped awake, senses buzzing. He sat up, head automatically turning to follow the yell that had woken him, and saw Mereii scrambling back up against the wall, screaming a rather muffled string of insults through his hands, which were clamped across his left eye and nose. 

"Kat?" said Chet, as the girl stormed past him. He didn't need his special perception to see the blood on her knuckles, or the fire in her eyes. "What happened?" 

"I just handed in my notice." she snarled, and stomped out. 


	11. Justification

In the wake of Kat's exit, the only sound for several minutes was Mereii's harsh breathing and infrequent sniffing as he held his head back in an attempt to stem his enthusiastically-bleeding nose. After a while, when it had more or less stopped, he gingerly removed his hand from the area, blinking his swelling left eye- 

"Well, well. Who'd've thought." said a voice. Mereii started, snapped his head to the left and stared straight into the twin green vortexes of Chet Karos's stare. He gasped involuntarily - he hadn't even registered that the man had _moved, _let alone crossed the room and crouched down barely a metre from him. 

Chet was grinning with what looked to the psychologist like barely contained glee. "You know, she put up with you for nearly _twenty seconds _longer than I thought she would. That's quite an achievement. Of course," he said, settling into a more comfortable cross-legged position on the carpet, "some people have had more practice. Take me, for example. I had to put up with you for five years, three months, and nineteen daysI should probably get some kind of award." 

"Stay away from me." said Mereii warily, craning back against the wall. Chet raised his brow in mock-offence. 

"That's not very friendly, now, is it? Anyway, she won't be gone for long. Just around the block, to calm down. I shouldn't think that'll take her any longer thantwo hours? Till then, it's just you and me." The grin got wider. "Isn't that nice?" 

Without taking his eyes from Mereii's face, Chet reached out a hand and picked up a dark hanging shape that had been draped over the back of a nearby chair. The psychologist's jacket. 

"Just taking a quick look. Is that all right?" he asked, mildly. Then, flipping the jacket over his knees, he started to go through the pockets. 

Mereii watched in seething silence, perhaps aware that there wasn't anything he could say that was likely to deter his ex-patient at this point. Chet rummaged for a few moments before hiking an eyebrow in satisfaction and pulling out a slim leather wallet. "Nicematches the jacket, too. Lesseecredit cardcredit cardcredit cardwhoah, Johnyou think you have enough?" He stopped flicking and removed a card from its plastic sleeve, holding it up to the light. "You might probably want to cancel this one," he said, helpfully. "They're going to announce receivership at the end of this financial month." 

The look the other man gave him then, sheer hatred that was clear even through the colourful beginnings of a spectacular black eye, made it clear that this advice was not appreciated. Chet shrugged and continued to poke through the wallet. "Ah, a driving licence" He studied the document. "Yup, it's definitely youthough I have to say I'm surprised. I wasn't sure iflike you showed up in photographs. Or was it mirrors?" Chet grinned. "Never could remember." 

He refolded the paper and tucked it back, then flicked through the remaining sections of the wallet, a slight frown slowly gathering on his forehead. Finally he looked up. "Don't people usually have photos in their wallets, Johnny? You know, family, friends" Leaving the query and the inference deftly hanging in the silence, Chet glanced into the bill pocket, snorted, and tossed the wallet to one side. 

"What else" A pocket jingled. Chet ferreted in it and produced a set of car keys. "Hey, this is a nice car, John." he said, after a moment's scrutiny. "Really. I bet lots of people would like a car like this." 

He aimed the keys after the wallet and rummaged on. An inside pocket surrendered a small, dull grey cylinder, with a couple of buttons along its smooth length. After a minute of experimental fiddling, the thing revealed itself to be a miniature optical torch, producing a thin beam of bright white light that pierced across the darkened room right up to the far wall. 

Almost immediately, a pair of wide, wide eyes framed by a shock of blond hair reared up from the back of the sofa. Mereii jumped, but this new apparition ignored him - evidently fascinated by the brilliant glow. 

"Wow, that's pretty!" 

"You don't want it, Star," said Chet, offhandedly, clicking the torch off and dropping it back into the pocket. "He's touched it." 

"Aww" whined Star, and dropped from sight again with a protesting creak of sofa springs. Chet half-shook his head, then turned his attention back to the jacket. "What else? Changea paperclipall a bit mundane, isn't it? I must admit i was expecting something a bit more_ah."_

From the very last pocket, he slowly drew out a small, flattish box. It was the same kind of metal grey as the torch, and it opened with a touch. 

Inside, packed carefully in shaped moulding, three loaded syringes gleamed. 

Chet stared at them. Their glassy, dangerous glitter was picked up and mirrored in his eyes, and his long fingers curled carefully around the box in an unconscious claim. 

"Well," he said, after a moment. The word escaped him in a soft laughing breath. He looked up at Mereii, who had gone very, very still. 

"One for each of us, Johnny-boy? Was that the idea?" 

The right-hand ampoule was filled with a deep purplish liquid, while the one in the centre practically glowed a happy blue. The left-hand one, however, was a fevery, emerald green, and it was this that Chet worked out of the moulding and raised to eye level. 

"Which one was meant for me? This one, maybe?" There was a tiny plastic cap on the syringe's tip. Delicately, he picked it off, turning the instrument back and forth so that beads of light slid along the long, hairfine point. "What does it do?" 

"Get that out my face, Karos," snarled Mereii. "I'm not scared of you." 

"Really." said Chet, and there was nothing light about his tone now. "That's why you're sweating, is it? That's why your pulse is racing, your pupils are contracting, your skin's paling as blood rushes to your oh-so-efficient brain as it races to work out how to save itself." He shook his head, his smile widening. "You and your drugs, John, you have no idea how sensitive you've made me. I can read you like a book, and right now you're making _very_ interesting reading." He slipped his fingers into the syringe's grips. "Tell me, _psychologist, _what's the clinical term for fear of injections'?" 

Mereii said nothing. His face was the colour of elderly whitewash where it wasn't involved in the bruise, his adam's apple convulsing like a Ping-Pong ball in a sock. 

Chet's smile reached Carrol-esque proportions as he held the syringe upright, tapping it to dislodge the air. "You know, I've watched you do this so many times, I could probably do it in my sleep." he remarked conversationally, then with a speed and force that belied his calm demeanour he reached out and yanked the psychologist's right sleeve back to his elbow. This provoked a strange startled yapping sound, as if the doctor couldn't decide whether to retch or scream. Then Chet raised the syringe, and clinched it for him. 

_"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHGETOFFAMEEEYOUPSYCHOLEGGO!" _Mereii yodelled, the unmistakable hysteria of pure phobia rattling in his voice. 

From the sofa, the shock of blond hair rose again and looked sharply over. The shock's owner, who still looked very much awake, leaned over the back of the couch, his blue eyes twinkling from behind the jaded walls that had been formed. 

"What'cha gonna do?" Star asked curiously. 

"Oh, nothing," Chet replied, smiling viciously at John, still holding the needle in front of the terrified man's face. John looked like he was going to get a heart attack any second now, shaking, his face stark pale and eyes widened to the size of wheels on a matchbox car. He was curled back as far as he could from his ex-patient, but Chet's grip on his arm was like a vice. 

_THWUMP._

The room shook oh-so-slightly, and from the room beyond the kitchen there came a couple of heavy clanksand a final _whudd _that made the floor shudder and a spindle-legged wooden cheetah-thing dance off its precarious perch on the windowsill and bounce on the rug. Chet paused, then shook his head impatiently and turned his attention back to the matter in hand. 

Footsteps in the kitchen, then the door opened and Otto strode into the main room. Strode' was really the only appropriate word, with all the confidence and composure that the word suggested, and no wonder either. Far from the weary, straightjacketed, dishevelled trauma survivor of the night before, he looked as if he had stepped right out of what Escher might have whimsically labelled the old days.' The tentacles curled up around his sides and over his shoulders, unfurling claws brushing against the upturned collar of his long tawny trenchcoat. Underneath, the shine of the spinal brace bisected a loose dark red duster and heavy charcoal combats, the hem of the trench sweeping against the ankles of his scuffed army boots as he walked. Walked taller, too, as if far more than just a couple of pounds of circuitry and smug blue lights had been removed from the weight he carried. His hair was an untidy glow of hazel, and his eyes were half-hidden by new, streamlined shades. If Kat had been there to bear witness, she would have probably whooped and punched the air, although the deadly seriousness in his expression would have quietened her soon enough. A flare of red light slanted across the floor and fell across Chet's back, throwing the precog's frizz-headed silhouette stark as a shadow-play puppet across the corner and the cowering Mereii. The actuators clicked and chirped, texturing Otto's voice as he spoke, his tone quiet and clear. 

"That's far enough, Chet." 

Chet didn't even glance in Otto's direction, his attention still riveted on John's exposed, rigid forearm. "I really don't think so," he said. 

Otto crossed the room, his actuators rising around him. "Chet, I'm asking you. Don't force us to stop you." 

Now Chet _did _look up. His grin had disappeared, and he looked wounded. 

"But" Chet rose, rallying, _angry. _"You're siding with _him?_ You? _You, _of all-" 

_"I am not siding with him." _Backed by a quartet of volatile hissing rattles, Otto's voice was all the more deadly because it was quiet. Chet blanched, and lowered the syringe. 

"We still owe Escher and Kat," continued Otto. "We owe it to them to ensure that they can walk out of all of this without blame. Which, unfortunately, is something they can only do if _he_ keeps his mouth shut. I know you understand that, because it was you that suggested we bring him with us in the first place." 

"I didn't suggest' it," said Chet, sullenly. "I just saw that we _did."_

"The result is the same. Directly because of youradvice, Escher and Kat are still safe from suspicion. Now, I need to make sure they'll _stay _safe. And to do that, I'm afraid that I need our stoic friend here to stay lucid." 

"How about semi-lucid? I could just use half of this-" 

"Chet." 

"All right, a quarter-" 

_"Chet."_

"Fine, I won't depress the thingie, I'll just-" 

"Chet, surely you don't want to sink to his level?" 

"That," hissed Chet, "would require some kind of weighted suit." But he dropped the syringe back into the box with bad grace, slamming the lid. With a scowl, he let go of Mereii's arm, who pulled it back as fast as if he was removing it from a shark tank. The next moment he froze again, however, as Chet leaned forwards and said, quietly and deliberately; "I'd thank Dr. Octavius, if I were you, Johnny-boy. Although, y'know, he can't watch you all the time..." 

Then he got up, tossing the case disdainfully aside, and slunk across the room, scrubbing the hand which had held the psychologist's wrist on his shirt. The kitchen door banged shut behind him. 

Directly above the lintel, a large and rather grotesque wooden clock, a souvenir from a high school trip to Amsterdam, pocked the seconds away noisily into the next minute. Eventually, Otto spoke. 

"Don't feel like thanking me, then?" 

"Not for a million dollars." spat Mereii, who was trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to work his shirtsleeve down again with his tethered arm. 

"Oh, I doubt that." The doctor held out an arm nonchalantly towards a sideboard, and an upper tentacle glided out and snagged a musty, dogeared book from one of the many piles on it. The claw curled back and dropped the volume into Otto's hand with the ceremony of a proud Golden Retriever with a newspaper. "You strike me as someone who'd do _anything _for a million dollars. I'd go into examples, but the only one I can think of involves your grandmother, so I think I'll refrain." He studied the book's back cover with interest, then opened it in the middle. "But I have to say, you're right in one way. You've got nothing to thank me for." 

"What you did to me." said Mereii, very clearly, "made me lose my _one. Chance. At real SUCCESS."_ These last words carried an explosive, rising intonation, as if they were having to fight, one by one, to surface from some great internal ocean of bile. 

Otto shut the book with a snap. 

"What you did to me," he replied, with equal clarity, "made me lose my _mind."_

But if the psychologist picked up the deadly note in Otto's voice, he didn't regard it, choosing instead to plunge on recklessly. There was a certain glint to his eyes, now, the sort of manic abandon that suggests that the mind within knows full well that it is standing on the metaphorical plank, but still cannot resist stamping on it to see how precarious it really is. "An eye for an eye-" 

_WhiiiisssssssstSHIIINGGGG _

"What," growled Otto, _"did you say?"_

Mereii gasped and tried not to blink, since to do so would be to neatly bisect his left eyelid on the gleaming fissile blade that had materialised barely a millimetre in front of it. It held rock steady, making the psychologist appear to be shaking even more by comparison. 

"D-D-Doctor Octavius...t-t-that's really not necessary" He strained back desperately, trying to avoid doing to his own eye what cocktail-stick-wielding bartenders are paid to do to olives.

"Ah, I see." The tentacle pulled the spike back and went back to floating near Otto's head as he spoke, his tone smoothing over. "You don't want to die. You would presumably prefer to be locked inside a rubber room and have drugs tested on you." Otto regarded Mereii's expression for a moment and then looked idly back to the book in his hand, speaking to the page. "No? Not that either? Well, you sure didn't give me any other choices, now, did you?"

"I...I"

The mock-pleasant demeanour evaporated as Otto turned sharply to face Mereii, "You _what, _John? You thought I would be a good test subject? Perhaps you thought no one would ever come to save me? Perhaps you thought that the criminally insane deserve to be treated worse than lab monkeys? Perhaps you thought I could make you a nice few thousand dollars, hmm?"

Throughout this speech, John's eyes had gotten progressively narrower. "You destroyed my life." he growled.

"You destroyed mine. So, I suppose we're even."

"Even? _EVEN? _You landed me in that_hole! _In Sporlock! In that crappy backwater nuthouse, where I got nothing and made nothing and _was_ nothing and_- ulgg!"_

One actuator firmly wrapped around Mereii's neck, Otto brought the man a little- a _lot-_ too close for comfort and gave him a very, very unimpressed look. "You are a very lucky man, John Mereii. You're lucky I'm not going to kill you here and now, because that is quite honestly what you deserve. You deserve to be _impaled,_ Dr. Mereii. I hope I make myself clear in this respect."

John nodded energetically, his free hand wrapped around the claws of the tentacle and feet kicking, desperate for something to stand on.

"You will be brought to court on charges of malpractice, fraud, embezzlement, channelling illegal funds, and testing unlicensed products upon human subjects. And you will plead guilty on each and every one of those charges. OrI will let my tentacles do what they wish with you."

One look at the scarlet eye-light that was hovering at Otto's side gave John a very, very good idea of what they intended to do. And it was not good. Well, it was good if you liked gory, painful, and violent things. But for John, who wanted to remain in one piece, whatever those mechanical things had in store for him would most certainly not work with his goal of remaining alive and not in pain.

"And I promise you, Mereii, that if either Katarina Morrigan or Escher Griffin become publicly involved in _any_ of this, and if I have the slightest suspicion that you are to blame, the things that will happen to you will make what Chet was going to do look positively _enjoyable,_ by comparison. Do I make myself crystal clear?"

"Yes." Mereii squeaked, trying to breathe.

His wish was granted and he was dropped on the floor, Otto and all his arms staring down at him.

"That's good." 

"Aww" Otto turned to see Kat standing in the doorway, a bag of groceries tucked under one arm, Escher craning over her shoulder. "You're not going to mash him up into teeny tiny bits?" 

"That's up to him." The doctor and his actuators continued to stare fixedly at the quailing psychologist for a few more seconds, before turning away in a motion that mixed dismissal with disgust. 

"What happened to _him?" _murmured Escher, who had just spotted Mereii's eye. 

"I did," said Kat with grim satisfaction. 

Mereii struggled upright, still shaking, but now with fury. "You have no right to judge me!" he screamed. "You hear me, Octavius? _No right! _How _dare _you tell me what I deserve? After what you did to me-" 

Kat exploded. "WHAT? What, John, _what_ did he do? What could he have possibly done to deserve you locking him up in a padded cell, shooting every single dangerous chemical you could lay your hands on into his bloodstream, and trying your sick best to convince him he was crazy? I give up! Tell me! What crime could be so bad that you thought it gave you a license to take a, a _genius_ and turn him into a mindless vegetable? Uhsorry, Otto" 

"That's quite all right." Otto said, calmly. He was standing before one of the tall windows, an actuator curling around to carefully part a couple of blind-slats. Beyond, mid-day Manhattan fried quietly under a cloudless sky. "Well, go on, John, why don't you tell her? If what I did was so severe, if you're so firmly in the right, surely you have nothing to lose?" He turned, brows arching. "What's the problem - don't you trust Kat to be able to discern between a justified crusade and a vicious, small-minded vendetta?" 

Mereii muttered something under his breath. Kat didn't catch it, but from the look he gave her at the same time, she guessed that it was none too complementary. 

"Well, why not let me, instead?" Otto turned, leaning his shoulder offhandedly against the wall. "After all, I _am _the guilty party. And I _do _knowyou gave me enough hints, didn't you? All those months" At this, all four claws gaped agitatedly, pincers snapping in Mereii's direction. Otto raised a hand, and the tentacles subsided a little, although they continued to click and chitter darkly. "Not that I wassentient enough to put the pieces together. But I am now." 

He paused, and fixed Mereii with a stare which would have frozen Hell. 

"I made him miss a job interview." 

There was an interesting silence. Kat, Escher, and Chet just looked at Otto, then in speechless synch turned to Mereii. Star, on the other hand, was busy staring avidly a fossily rock on the mantelpiece, trying to catch it moving. 

Otto's voice was hard, deadly. "Took the El train, didn't you, John? The 9:15 to Uptown and Queens. Didn't enjoy the trip, either, I take it." A graveyard laugh. "I hope it was a pretty good place you were going forI'd hate to think that you drove me out of my mind over some mediocre desk job." 

"Wait, _that's it?" _Kat had finally rediscovered her voice. "That's IT? That's all he did to you?" She paused for a moment. "Wait. Wait a second here. You're telling me that he made you miss a job appointment so you MADE HIM BRAINDEAD! You...you...you" She sputtered at him, staring down. "Youyou freak! Youyou demented psycho! Youdamn, I don't even know what to call you!" She looked well on the way to giving him another black eye, for the sheer sake of matching. Instead, she sputtered more and looked absolutely stunned. 

"John," she said, "this is the only time I can ever remember being rendered absolutely speechless." 

It appeared Mereii didn't particularly care about this distinction. His fists were clenching and unclenching at his sides, grinding into his palms. "I had everything going for me! _NO-ONE was better than me for that position!_ And hehe just came along and wiped it out! Everything I'd been working for! YOU DIDN'T EVEN LOOK AT ME!" He rounded on Otto, who actually backed off a pace, startled actuators hissing. "You came for Spider-Man, you got him, and to hell with everyone else! Collateral damage, that's all I was! You ruined my life, and you didn't even _know _it!" 

"He didn't ruin your life!" Escher broke in, furiously. "Are you seriously saying that one bad day-" 

_"One bad day?" _screamed Mereii. "Do you know how many times I relived that one bad day', you stupid girl? Over and over andIt took me _months _to get past it, recover, get back to work. And when I did, I - I was a laughing stock! A cardiologist can have a heart attack, and no-one thinks any less of them, but God forbid a psychologist should have a stress-induced mental breakdown! I was an_embarrassment_ to them! They relegated me to Sporlock, that sinking dead-end _pit, _hoping it'd take me with it into obscurity." He straightened, as if addressing a grand audience, or at least an audience that wasn't comprised of five people, all of whom thought him slightly less appealing than athlete's foot. Jabbing a savage finger at the tentacled scientist, he ranted on. "Well, this is one loose end that didn't give up, Octavius! I swore I'd get you, and I _did."_

"Mereii, you're a doctor." ground Kat. "You're supposed to _cure_ people, not-" 

"Ah, but I did, Kat." Mereii laced his hands behind his back, instantly the indulgent tutor, although the clattering this provoked from the chain around his wrist added something of an askew touch."I cured him, all right. I cured his delusions, his false rationalizations and self-absolutionseverything that let him believe he had somehow earned the right to consider himself human! _And it still wasn't enough!"_ Calm evaporating in an instant, he swung round on Otto. _"You,_ you have no idea what it feels like to fail so badly, to be _so close-"_

"John," said Otto, matter-of-factly, "unless you consider that finger a surplus, I suggest you get it out of my face. Right now." 

A few tense seconds passed before Mereii complied, his lip twisting with hatred as he glared at Otto, who gave him a humourless grin in return. "What did you hope to achieve with that little speech, John?" he said, and his words carried the sort of light, careless inflection which made Kat wince and Escher glance automatically sideways to locate something to dive behind. "You really expect me to justify myself to you? You're the last person on Earth to whom I'd apologize, Mereii, even if I thought an apology was appropriate." He advanced a few steps, backing the psychologist into the corner. "Not that it's any business of yours, but there are very few things in this world which I'believe I've earned' My sanity happens to be one of them, so you'll excuse me if I fail to appreciate your attempts to unburden me of it." 

Falling silent, Otto stared at Mereii for several long moments before turning abruptly and tentacle-walking into the kitchen. Kat stared at the place where he had been before following at a run. 

"You sure are good are pissing people off, Dr. Mereii," Escher said, giving him a dry beam before heading off to her room, but not before grabbing her final semester project before Chet decided to use it as a weapon again. 

Sputtering at her stripy back, John sat and fumed till he noticed Chet's gaze on him. Whatever the precog was about to say was instantly drowned out by Kat's annoying voice. 

"ESCHER!" she shouted from the kitchen. "CAN I GET TO THE ROOF!" 

"YEAH!" Escher shouted back, making both Chet and John wince. 

The three that remained in the room watched her sprint through the apartment and run through the door, the sounds of her sandals on the steps echoing through the hallway. Mereii sighed, and gave Chet a look that dared him to say something. Chet, however, grinned evilly at him and pushed off the couch, ruffling the psychiatrist's hair as he walked past to flop down on the mattress. John attempted to grab the precog's wrist, but missed by a long shot. 

You'd think he saw it coming. 

"Hey." 

One actuator snapped from clicking on Otto's shoulder, looking back towards the roof block door. 

**Katarina.**

"Hello, Kat," he replied. 

"Hey, Otto," She stepped up to next to him on the edge, and glanced at his face. "You look nice in the new getup." 

"Thanks, I feel better too. There's somethingparticularly stifling about a straitjacket." 

"Well." She grinned a bit, and patted his shoulder. "Considering that it's meant to hold lunatics, I'm not particularly surprised by that. Reminds me of the good ol' days, y'know? Back when we weren't running from anyone." 

Otto frowned a bit, and looked the other way. "Yes," he said, a bit cooler. "Those days were a long time ago now, though, and we should move on. There's more danger now, and the carelessness that we had thenwe can't keep working with." 

Kat blinked at him. ".kinda parently there, aren't ya? What got you down?" 

He turned to her. "Why did you stop calling me, six years ago? I never figured it out. You just cut contact, and I felt dropped like some sort of hotplate." 

The girl frowned, and looked at an actuator, which chirped. 

**You _abandoned_ our Father. You hurt him, woman, and you should pay for that**

_Stop it. _

**Father**

Stop _it. _

**Yes, Father.**

"It doesn't like me, does it?" she asked, glancing at him. 

"No, it doesn't. It's picked up the fact that I think you abandoned me. " 

Kat practically gaped at him. "Abandoned you? Me? I would _never_! I had finals Otto, and class, and more class, and friends andand stuff! I didn't _mean_ to, I mean, one day, you didn't return _my _call, so I didn't call back and went to a party andand I guess it just dissolved." She frowned, then looked away. "I...I'm sorry. I didn't mean to, then." 

"It's okay. I can understand." His new shoes suddenly became a whole lot more interesting with Kat's gaze fixed on the side of his head. "I mean, you're a college student, you have a life and allI shouldn't try and get in the way." 

"Otto, you're not getting in the way." She looked at him. "And I don't mean to make you feel guilty, eitherI guess you have enough of that to cope with." 

He glanced at an actuator, which chittered a denial, and sighed. "I guess you're right, Kat. I have to live with what I did. Every day, for the rest of my life, I will have to carry the knowledge with me. The mere fact -and, as much as I'd like to think that it was his drugs that made me believe it, it wasn't- that I caused the pain and suffering and..." he paused, looking outward, "it's a burden you don't want." He offered a weak smile to Kat. "Believe me, it's a hell of a lot heavier than these actuators." 

An actuator chirped and rubbed against his shoulder in what Kat guessed to be affection, and Otto's hand found it, rubbing the pitted metal exterior of the claw like one would rub behind a dog's ears. 

"Oh, they say it wasn't me, and I want to believe them, butwhat it would mean if I did? It would be so easy, but I know I would always be wondering; did I really believe it, or did I let them take the weight because I grew tired of bearing it myself?" Another pause, in which he looked down at the gaping red heartlight, thinking. The other three shifted down so all four were looking at him, eyes like eager children. "And if so" He glanced at them, then Kat. "What would that make me?" 

Kat looked at him, and was silent for a long while. "Iknow. I guesswell, with that kind of baggagewouldn't you try to get rid of it?" 

"And be a coward?" 

"That's not cowardice," she said, quietly. "That's just self-defence. That kind of stuff could drive you crazy. Assuming whacked-out needle-happy demented idiots don't get there first. You didn't let him get to you, did you?" 

This time, he turned his entire head, and just shrugged. "No, not really." 

**Your thoughts suggest otherwise, Father.**

_I know that, it's justI can't help thinking about it._

**Father, it was not your fault. It was ours. You and we both know this, yet you refuse to accept it time after time. We do not understand.**

_I feel as if I could have stopped it, somehow._

Their voices were somewhat eerie. **You could not have stopped us.**

Kat waited for a moment, till the spacing look of inner dialogue left her friend's eyes, then took a deep breath. "So, what happens now?" 

Her tone was bright, and the doctor smiled despite himself. "WellI'll drop Mereii off at the nearest police station," he said, watching a small flock of birds scatter overhead. "Care of the mentally ill is something of a sensitive issue, I understandhe won't get off lightly." He huffed a short laugh. "How's that for cowardice, Kat? I can't stomach the thought of ripping him to shreds myself, so I'm going to let the lawyers do it for me." The tentacles rose slightly as he yawned, one nudging him anxiously in the shoulder. "YesI suppose it can wait until morning. I feel like I haven't slept for a year." 

"I'm not at all surprised," said Kat, grinning. "I don't feel too awake myself. It's like, every time I shut my eyes, something crazy happens." 

Otto looked towards the darkening horizon for a moment, then turned. To her surprise, he was smiling too. 

"Come on, let's go inside. We'll finish this tomorrow." 

Midnight came. 

The apartment was silent and still, and utterly dark. The peculiar almost-wall-height strip windows that lined the main room were prone to letting in a huge amount of streetlamps and other light pollution if left uncovered, which was why Escher had installed the blackout blinds in the first place, in a fit of practicality the previous winter. She had in fact gone perhaps a little too far in the opposite direction, effectively turning her huge and cluttered main room into an instant black hole whenever the blinds were down. Unless you were a cat, or equipped with heat-sensitive vision, you were more or less screwed. 

It had taken quite a long time for all of the room's occupants to settle. After a little light furniture rearrangement (not such a tricky task when one of the participants is able to lift a table and set it down halfway across the room without so much as looking up from his book), Escher had finally decamped to her room, Kat, Chet, and Star to their respective places of the night before, and Otto to the other sofa, which was a little larger and not so likely to collapse if suddenly introduced to the tentacles' formidable weight. He in particular had taken a while to fall asleep, and it had been almost two hours more before the last actuator drooped to the carpet and closed, the cessation of its heart-light allowing true darkness to take over the room. 

Another half hour crept past. 

Then- 

A faint rustling, just enough to suggest motion. A tiny, chainlinky _clank, _quickly muffled. There was still nothing to see by, but from the careful shifting sounds that were now coming from one corner of the large, still space, it was just about possible to imagine a stretching shadow, a hand, gingerly groping 

The sound stopped. A moment, then it was replaced by a clothy rummaging, which ended ina short, satisfied breath. Almost a whole minute passed, this time. 

Then- 

_Click._

Blindingly bright for something so small, the white beam of a tiny optical torch flared at the ceiling, casting a Hammer-Horror-type uplit shadow onto the face of John Mereii. The room flooded with deep, shifting grey shadows, furniture and sleeping bodies alike picked out by the beam. Quickly, Mereii shielded it with a hand, only letting a tiny glow through his fingers, backlighting his hand a weird inner pink. He blinked, then narrowed his eyes and squinted through the gloom in the direction of one of the sofas. His glasses-free vision too poor to make any sense out of the shadows there, he finally called over, his voice a cautious hiss. 

"TorenStar. _Star. _Are you awake?" 

There was no movement from the sofa. Mereii grimaced impatiently, licked dry lips, then tried again, leaning forwards intently. _"Star!"_

"Yup!" said Star, in Mereii's left ear. 

The psychologist twisted, shock battling the urgent need to stay quiet for possession of his vocal chords. The latter won, and Mereii merely loosed a deflated, half-hysterical sighing noise. 

_"Gahhh, _Toren, you nearly-" 

Star sniggered, and singsonged; "Scaredy scaredy stealer." 

Mereii attempted to give him a withering glare, but he might as well have been throwing water at a dolphin for all the disciplinary effect this had. His temper didn't improve when he spotted that the lunatic was wearing his missing tielike a bandanna. 

Meanwhile, Star had abruptly stopped looking pleased with himself and was instead focusing intently on Mereii's still-glowing hand. He leaned forwards, curiously, eyes wide. "What's that?" 

Mereii shifted his palm casually, letting the white point of light sparkle between his fingers. "Pretty, isn't it?" He sneaked a quick glance up and grinned inwardly at Star's rapt gaze, then held the torch out on his palm. "Would you like it?" 

The blue eyes lit up. _"Yeah!"_ Star's hand shot out, but Mereii pulled back fast. 

"Ah ah ah." he said, smoothly. "I can't give you something for nothing, Star. That just wouldn't be _fair, _now, would it?" 

Star blinked for a moment, before comprehension flared and sent him digging into the pocket of his new pants. "I'll trade you, then," he agreed, and proffered a handful ofwell, _stuff._ Although the origins of the objects were a mystery, the theme was definitely shiny', a category that included a flattened quarter, a starling feather with a brilliant blue sheen, three bottle caps, the metal twist off a champagne cork, several bits of smoothed glass, and the side-buckle of his straitjacket, with a ragged scrap of white cloth still trailing from it. 

There was a pause as Mereii regarded this jumble, his expression one of serious appraisal. "Hmmno, I don't think so," he said, finally. "I'm sorry, Star, but I think I'll hang on to it after all. Unless" He stopped, turning the torch over in his long fingers, shaking his head. 

"What?" demanded Star, eagerly. 

"Wellit would hardly be a trade, would it? I meanboth things already belong to me. Pointless, really." His voice was matter-of-fact, as if he was talking more to himself than anything, although the shrewd sideways look he threw in Star's direction suggested otherwise. 

Star was edgy, watching the shining end of the torch, getting frustrated. "Whatisit? What do you wanna trade? I really want itit's _pretty!"_

Mereii hummed, thoughtfully. "Wellall righthow about _that?"_

His other hand extended, pointing across the room to a table, just visible in the glow. Star turned to look, brow scrunching questioningly. 

"Atable?" 

Mereii rolled his eyes. "No, you du- ah, I mean, no, not the table, the thing on it. There." 

"That box?" 

"Yes." The psychologist folded his arms. "There you go, Star. Bring me thatbox, and we have a deal." 

Star hesitated. "I don't knowwhat is it?" 

"What does it look like?" said Mereii, swiftly. "It's just a box, useless, really. Trust me." 

"I don't trust you." Star's reply was immediate, instinctive. 

Mereii scowled, but recovered fast. "Humour me, then. That box hassentimental value. Come on, look." He rattled the chain around his wrist. "What use is it to me? I'm not going anywhere." 

"But Kitty said-" 

"Do you want this," said Mereii, holding the torch up pointedly, "or don't you?" 

Star stared at it, clearly struggling. For a moment, his expression was a conflicting mix of longing, awe, and distrust. He was still frowning. 

"Icould justtake it" he said, after a moment. 

Mereii blinked and thought rapidly, worried by this unexpected turn. He certainly appreciated the truth in Star's statement; the first (and last) time that he had underestimated this particular patient's speed and strength, it had cost him a fractured radius and a number of painful punctures. 

"Oh, but, Star," he said, reprovingly, "that would be _stealing."_

That did it. Star bit his lip, thought for maybe five seconds more, then turned and bounded across the room to the table. He picked up the box' in both hands, making a surprised sound as he registered how heavy it was, then returned to Mereii's corner. 

"Here you go!" he said, happily, and promptly chucked it at him. Caught off guard, the psychologist yelped and nearly dropped it, then placed it on the floor and tossed the torch over, grudgingly. 

"There. Now stay out of my way, and don't use it in here, or I'llmake it not work. Understand?" 

Star nodded, wide-eyed, and disappeared into the kitchen, presumably to find somewhere safe to hide his new treasure. The light went with him, flicking on and off like Morse code as he located and played with the torch's switch. The kitchen door banged behind him. 

The pitch dark returned, textured by the tense non-sound of someone holding their breath. After a while, when it became clear that the horribly loud sound of the door hadn't woken anyone, there was a fumbling sound, and a quiet _chak _like that of a button being depressed. A tiny blue light flickered up, followed by another. 

Crosslegged, his laptop perched carefully on his knees, Mereii took one last calculating look around the rest of the room, then lifted the lid. 

The screen flared, then dulled as he scrolled the brightness down. Index on the touchpad, he clicked swiftly through to a login screen, entering a series of passwords with a blurring rattle of keys. The machine _whuzzzed, _and a blue circle started to rotate in the center of the screen. 

PLEASE WAIT. TRYING TO ESTABLISH LOCAL AREA NETWORK CONNECTION. 

"Come _on" _hissed John, his nose maybe two inches from the screen, his eyes wide. "Find it, you piece of" 

A mellow _ding, _and another message flashed up. 

CONNECTED AT 9Mbps. YOUR LOGIN HAS BEEN ACCEPTED. 

A slow, spreading smirk was the response to this news. A few more fast clicks, and another warning message. 

YOU HAVE CHOSEN TO ENTER HIDDEN DOMAIN http/www.jmcache88.au/bpfiles/octavius/blueprints00 /secupload.pdf 

CONTINUE? 

_"Yes,"_ murmured John, the charnel grin hiking up another few notches as he clicked again. Settling down more comfortably on the floor, the screen reflecting coldly in his eyes, he started to type. 


	12. Defeat

_"Octavius, wake UP!" _

Chet's eyes snapped open, one hand going to his ear. He wasn't sure if the voice had been his abilities or his dream, and stared at the wall, trying to think. He rarely heard his own voice (and he was sure that it had been his voice) in his glimpses of the future, a fact which made him decide that it must have been just a dream. He relaxed, gathering his thoughts, and noting with a fresh relief that his arms and shoulders weren't incredibly stiff and tense, something that often resulted from sleeping in a straitjacket. 

He blinked and shifted, the mattress creaking under him. Suddenly the wall was replaced by the ceiling for his contemplated-staring/thinking. Well, more like the makeshift hammock-type structure that had been poorly rigged above him. Star, it appeared had been busy during the night. What detail wasn't blotted out by the crisscrossing rope was hidden by Star's sleeping body, except for a small, super-bright point of light that seemed to come from his hands and shine onto his face, making him look rather eerie. 

Chet looked at this light curiously, realizing that it did not match the rest of the place. He frowned and stood up on the mattress, examining it. 

It turned out to be the light-torch from Mereii's pocket. 

_"Damn you, John!" _

Blinking again, he stared hard at the torch, the pit of his stomach suddenly twisting painfully. He remembered. 

Star had been fascinated by the light. The only way he could have gotten it would have been if someone gave it to him, or he got it himself. It seemed unlikely that Star would go ruffling through the coat for himself, and Kat and Otto had fallen asleep almost immediately from the roof. _He_ hadn't done it, and he was pretty sure that Escher hadn't woken up. 

Which left one person. 

"Octavius, WAKE UP! GET JOHN!" yelled Chet. 

Now, Otto had not had a decent night's sleep in ages, and although his body awoke, his mind remained in the half-awoken state most commonly occupied by students in their first class at eight in the morning, after going to bed at two way earlier that morning. 

His mechanical children, however, were not human, and suffered no such problem. One of them snapped out across the room towards John's face, and a second to the top of the laptop. 

It was as if the sheer volume of events that crowded into the next few seconds actually slowed them down, stretching the time out to fit themselves in. Chet turned as he spoke, and beheld a sight that made him want to absolutely puke. Mereii was bunched over his laptop, the screen paling his face and his fingers typing away. The precog nearly kicked himself when he cocked his ears and realized that if he had been focused before, he could easily have heard the _clickclickclick_ of fingers on keys. 

The next second, however, the first claw hit the laptop lid from the back. John yelped, jerking backwards, and yelled several words that would have caused quite a few mothers-with-children to hit him with bricks. 

But Chet's eye was already super-focused on the psychologist's hand, which just before the tentacle had struck had been extending across the keyboard towards that time-honoured final command; ENTER. It was such a close thing, that it was actually more the slamming of the cover on Mereii's fingers that pressed that final key down. 

"AGHH!" shouted Mereii, trying to pull his hand back from the two layers of laptop that now neatly sandwiched it. "SHIT!" 

The actuator pressed harder on the cover, but then let up and snatched John's wrist in its cold claws as Otto turned, now very definitely awake and glaring down at Mereii in such a way that should definitely have caused instant death-by-sight. 

The shouting had woken Kat, Escher and Star, and it was the first two who rushed over, "Damn you, John!" Kat hissed, clearly considering the idea of giving him another black eye (again) and possibly kicking him in the face. She didn't, mainly because Chet shoved her out of his way and flipped up the lid of the laptop. 

He was met by a small, rectangular box with round edges in the middle of a blue Windows screen. The box had a smiley face in the left edge and the rest of it was occupied by a single sentence that gave him more chills then he'd probably had for most of his life. 

THIS ACTION HAS BEEN COMPLETED. 

Under it was an OK' button. No cancel. 

John, even in his current position, began to laugh, and looked directly at Otto with the eyes of a slightly demented man. "I win, Octavius," he said, smiling so smugly. "I _win_." 

.perhaps more then slightly. 

Otto stared at John right now, the man looked more like a patient in a mental ward then a caretaker. Though, on second thoughts, he _did_ look like a caretaker. Smug like one, anyway. 

**_Father, may we snap his wrist?_**

_No. _

The actuators mentally whined, but he ignored them and glared at the doctor, dragging him by the wrist as far as the chain would allow. He hadn't seen whatever had made Chet pale, but whatever it was, it must have been pretty bad. 

He was, however, shaken out of this line of thinking by what happened next. 

"Stealer!" shouted Star, diving from his ropy hammock onto John, belly-flop style. The man oof'ed, going down in surprise, and the actuator clinging to Mereii's wrist let go with a surprised _shrwriieeek. _

"Star!" Kat jumped for her friend, who seemed intent on beating the living snot out of John. He'd already granted the man another thump in the eye and a bloody nose, and the psychologist's feeble attempts to bat him away with only a hand and a half weren't working too well at all. 

"Star!" she shouted again, grabbing the boy by his arm and yanking him off Mereii. "Star, listen to me!" She grabbed his other arm and pulled him to face her, speaking fiercely. "What happened? What did he do to you?" 

Star blinked at her for several long seconds before suddenly hugging her tightly. "He's a stupid lying stealer! He told me it was just a box! But it's a glowing box with the alphabet on it and I think he did something bad and he lied to me!" 

"Why did he" She caught sight of the laptop, then turned back to where it _had_ been the previous night. Chet climbed into Star's hammock and retrieved a small, silver rod. Sighing, he hopped back out. 

"I think _this _is why." He held up the optical torch. Star looked at it longingly, then hugged Kat again, even tighter. 

"I'm sorry, Kitty!" he wailed. "I didn't do what you told me to do and I helped the stealer cause I _really _wanted the shiny thing and I didn't mean for anything bad to happen and I'm _sorrrryyy!" _

Kat frowned at the torch, then at John. Chet, who was pinching the bridge of his nose with his eyes screwed shut, explained. "Star wanted thisbecause it's so..." rolling his eyes, "_shiny._ I think he traded the laptop for it, albeit unknowingly." 

"That's right, Karos," Mereii spat, nursing his bloody nose as the other black eye blossomed to match the first. "Your idiot friend thought it was _just a box_. Stupid boy." 

"Don't talk about Star like that," said Kat, fiercely. "I should _let him_ beat the shit out of you." 

Otto, on the other hand, didn't care much about how Mereii had come to get hold of the laptop. One actuator broke the chain, one grabbed John's wrist and a third his neck, dragging the man towards him off the floor. "_What_ did you _do_, Mereii?" he snarled between gritted teeth. The two currently unoccupied claws hissed over his shoulders threateningly, and Mereii couldn't help attempting to inch back a bit. He failed quite badly, mainly because there was an actuator around his throat. 

"It doesn't matter, Octavius," he said, sneering anyway. The actuator around his throat clenched more, and he gagged, but didn't speak. Instead, he actually managed a wheezy, half-choked chuckle. Otto was taken aback, and a sort of foreboding worry starting to percolate through the anger in his expression. It wasn't a good sign, that Mereii should be so calm. He had rightfully pegged the psychologist as a bully and therefore, at the first sign of danger, an utter coward, but now he could see no fear in those somewhat inflamed grey eyes. Something was horribly wrong. 

Behind him, Kat had raced over to the laptop and was now clicking frantically, trying to get some kind of useful response. "Otto, help me, what do I do with this thing?" 

"It's too late, Katarina," said Mereii, with chilling levity. "You'd be better offpersuading him to let go of me, before he makes it any worse for himself." 

The laptop bleeped. This small noise, and Kat's exclamation that went with it, was a lot more attention-grabbing than it should have been alongside the enraged chitter of the actuators and Mereii's gagging. Otto turned his head just in time to see the screen clear and flash a new message. 

DISPLAY RECENTLY UPLOADED FILES 

Then, as if some electronic dam had burst inside the machine, the screen started to flood with pages and pages of images. Every second, it refreshed, and every second a new page appeared - dark blue backgrounds filled with minute white lines, sketches, schematics, paragraphs of mind-bendingly intricate code that went on for pages, accompanied by figures and cross-section views, and all traced in the same neat unvarying white. Mostly the data was indecipherable, instructions and equations and the strange city-map shapes of circuit diagrams, but here and there were drawings that depicted the structure of parts, of complex joints, of snakelike segments and angular claws 

Otto stood stock still, watching the scrolling, redrawing pages, the expression and color slowly draining from his features. After maybe half a minute, the two lower tentacles' claws parted slightly, and Mereii fell out of their grip and hit the floor. 

"What_is _that?" said Escher, who, like everyone else, was gazing at the endless, paging displays. "Th-they look like" 

"Blueprints, actually," said Mereii, loftily, getting to his feet and straightening his rather rumpled shirt. "I have something of a talent when it comes to computers, but unfortunately I didn't quite have the, hah, expert knowledge I needed to be able to make something to contain those_things." _He flicked a hand at the nearest tentacle, stepping around Otto, who still seemed rooted to the spot. "Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to acquire this copy once I found out where it was kept. The one and only copy in existence, isn't that right, Octavius?" 

Otto's eyes barely flicked away from the screen from a second. He wasn't so much staring _at_ it any more as _through _it, into some other dimension visible only to him. Whatever he was seeing there, it sure as hell wasn't good. "That's right." 

"Aheh" Mereii laughed like a winning card sharp. "Not any more." 

The tentacled doctor turned, finally, transferring his stare onto his enemy. Kat got a clearer look at him as he did so, and was shocked. Pale and blank-faced, Otto looked like some invisible force had come along and punched the stuffing out of him. He had looked better, she thought with a jolt, during a few of his more severe space-outs. 

Her ex-employer continued, and what he had to say soon pushed all such thoughts from Kat's mind. 

"Eight terabytes of data, Octavius. Every last line of code, every single page of instructions. Everything needed to reproduce those abominations welded to your spine, right down to the last screw and wire. Thorough, weren't you? It may well have taken a genius to create them, but to copy themI'm guessing far less." He smiled. "I've uploaded them into one of my lessaccessible accounts. In twelve hours time, unless I deactivate it, they'll be released onto twelve separate encrypted servers, and from there to mirrors all around the world." 

He padded forwards and leaned into Otto's face. As tall as he was, Otto still had perhaps two inches on him, plus the added intimidation of the claws that hovered perpetually at their host's sides, but Mereii seemed completely unfazed. If control was a drug, the psychologist was acting like an addict who had just found a lifetime's supply. "So, it's up to you. Either you give up, return to the asylum with me, and allow me to reacquaint your little pets with their collarsor by tomorrow morning every would-be supervillain the world over will be able to build themselves a set of their very own. Sound good to you, Doctor?" 

For a long time, nothing moved, besides, perhaps, the air. It seemed to be vibrating with a sort of horrified fear, and especially around the two girls who were staring at both doctors. Then, his actuators dipping with a quartet of confused, angry hisses, Otto spoke. 

"All right, Mereii," he said, quietly. "You win." 

_"WHAT?" _It took Kat and Escher a moment to realise that they'd spoken at the same time, and with pretty much the same tone. 

Otto, however, wasn't in any mood to appreciate this impressive spontaneous synchronisation. From the moment when he had recognised the blueprints, it had felt like a chunk had been torn out of his soul, a sickening sensation of seeing the way the future would go. Would _have _to go. 

When he had finished the blueprints, so long ago now, they had been the beginning of the end for him - if he'd only _known _it - and so it seemed that now, they had reappeared to begin his end again. For a moment he half-heartedly cursed the actuators, then realized it wasn't their fault. He was at fault here, and they had nothing to do with it well, mostly, at least. He mentally kicked himself about eight times for keeping the blueprints at all. He _should_ have destroyed them, but he hadn't, and he knew that it was the actuators that had kept him from destroying the plans for once and for all. It was in their nature to want everything to be a scientific certainty; they had wanted to be _sure _they'd have a backup plan of their own build, just in case the one they carried in their memory became corrupted in any way. And he'd agreed, because it was practical, but also (he realised now) because he was still proud of his work. 

But nowwhat choice did he have? He couldn't let what had happened to him happen to anyone else, anyone else who thought they could control itthe sort of power that they gave himit wasn't a power he could give to anyone else. No one could bear the strength he bore. Not even him. 

He took a long breath and spoke without looking at the two girls, his eyes downcast. "Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. I can't allow there to be even _one _more set of actuators. I can't risk those blueprints falling into evil hands." 

Escher gave a shaky snort. "Y-yeah, butyou can't just giveyou're kidding, right?" 

The tentacled doctor gave her a pained, please-don't-make-this-worse look, then turned back to Mereii. "You win. Do whatever you wanton one condition." 

"You're hardly in any position to negotiate." Mereii raised an eyebrow. 

Otto continued as if he hadn't spoken. "Leave these two alone," he said, indicating Chet and Star, who were still standing like statues behind him. "The same goes for Kat and Escher." 

"Hmm" Mereii folded his arms, thought for a second, then jerked his head in agreement. "Fine. What's two more screwballs to this city? Anyway, I'm sure I'll be more than occupied enough with your, uh, _treatment."_ He smiled, lazily. "I've got to hand it to you, Octavius. I have to admit I didn't think anyone in their right mind would give a damn about you once I got hold of you." He hiked a dismissive thumb at Kat and Escher. "But they're really convinced, aren't they? They really think you're worth all this. However you managed it, it's a nice trick." 

This was too much for Escher. "He's worth ten of you, you twisted sonofabitch." she snarled, and darted forwards before Kat or Chet could grab her. She took far too long to reach Mereii, even with the speed her anger gave her, and the startled doctor had all the time in the world to react. The laptop was still in his grip, and with a upslanting, double-handed swipe, he hit her with it. Hard, under the jaw. 

She collapsed at his feet. Otto made a wordless sound and lunged instinctively, the tentacles gaping and hissing like acid. But his adversary swung round to face him, and the sight of the still-raised laptop reminded him forcibly of the threat it represented. Mereii saw his expression freeze, and smirked. 

"Anyone else feel like being heroic?"he said. "No? How about you, Kat?" 

"Mereii, I swear," ground Kat, who was herself fighting against Chet's restraining grip on her arm, "I goddamn _guarantee _you you're going to pay for this." 

"I'll bet." Mereii sounded amused, and a touch bored. "You know, you really have to watch that temper, Kat. I'm sure _Otto _understands that he should count himself lucky that I'm not going to ship you and your friends to the police right now." He turned to Otto. "As to whether I ever will,well, you're going to have a lot of time to wonder about that. Now, shall we?' 

He stepped disdainfully over Escher's body, indicating the door. Otto threw him a look of flat murder and stooped to press his fingertips gently against the girl's neck, closing his eyes and breathing out in sheer silent relief at the steady rhythm. The lower actuators curled up and slid themselves under her shoulders and knees as he lifted them, then rose to support her while he straightened up and walked across the room. 

"She's all right," he told Kat, while the tentacles arranged Escher carefully on the sofa. "When she comes round, perhaps you can tell her that it's not always a good idea to throw yourself at the bad guy." He attempted a smile, trying to keep his voice light, trying to make this forced parting easier. "Thank you, Kat. I'm not sure you realize how much you two did for me." 

"Otto" Kat hadn't realised how close she was to tears until she spoke, a thick clot of helplessness the consistency of dough rising in her throat. "Otto, you can't let him do this, you _can't,_ there has to be something, some way-" 

"Listen." His interruption was abrupt, but his voice was gentle and charged with urgency. "You have to do something for me, all right? One more thing. _Don't interfere."_ He tried to smile. "I know how hard that is for you, but there's so much more at stake here. If those blueprints were ever releasedI owe it to everyone, everyone who'd suffer, who'd _die,_ to do this." Whickering in soft metallic distress, an actuator dipped and brushed the back of his hand. He raised it to touch the tarnished metal, running his palm over the claw in a distracted gesture of mutual reassurance. "And they agree." 

"But-" 

"I'll keep my word. Don't give him any excuse to break his." 

"But you know what he's going to do to you," Kat said miserably. "He'll-" 

"I know. I'll survive. Or a part of me will, perhaps-" At this Kat finally gave up and breathed in one shaky sob, a tear tracing her cheek and halting at the corner of her mouth. Instinct lifted Otto's hands awkwardly to her shoulders, his own voice cracking, trying to hearten her despite his own sadness. 

"-Oh, Kat, come on, please don't. I don't want to leave you like this." 

"I don't want you to leave, tentacle-boy." She swallowed and looked straight up into his face, anger taking over, eyes blazing. "This isn't- we- we can't let him _win!"_

The doctor sighed, and let go of her shoulders. "He's won already," he said. "All we can do is lose with dignity. Promise me, Katarina." 

Kat shook her head fiercely. 

"Promise me." 

She looked at him for a long moment. 

"Okay," she said, finally. "Okay." 

Otto gave her a sad smile, and then turned away. Mereii stepped back warily as he walked towards him, pulling the door open. 

"You first," he said. Otto barely glanced at him; lowering his head, he walked through the doorway into the lobby beyond. Mereii followed. A final, volatile rattle from the actuators, the creak and slamof the door, and then they were gone. 

For one, long, horrible minute, none of the three conscious people who remained in the apartment said anything. Then Kat, who had up till then been standing staring white-faced at the door like someone who has just received a needle through their frontal lobes, abruptly recovered enough to comment on what had just happened. In her own, highly intellectually incisive, style. 

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHFUCKINGOD_DAMN_IT!" she screamed, picked up the nearest hand-sized object (a paperback copy of Edward de Bono's _Lateral Thinking, _fourth edition), and hurled it across the room, where it slammed against the door with a surprisingly heavy _whud. _Chet winced. His expression made it plain that, for once, he was not finding anything amusing about the situation, ironically or otherwise. 

"Uh, Kat-" 

"The _bastard! _The fucking_I'm gonna kill him!_ I'm gonna-" 

"KAT!" Chet yelled. Kat stopped, breathing hard, glaring at him. He continued, tentatively, choosing his words with care in case he said something that turned him into the next target. The next book on the pile by Kat's side was a hardback, and not a short volume either. 

"Whatdo we do now?" 

Behind him, Star pulled himself up on the back of the sofa where Escher was lying. Balancing on the top, he leaned down and poked her in the forehead with an index finger. She groaned, shifted, then opened her eyes, gingerly feeling the bruising graze on her jaw. 

"Uhhhwhat the hell just happened? Mymy head feels like someone used it to score a field goal." The girl looked up, then around the room, her expression travelling fast into stomach-sinking realisation. "Oh_shit. _Where's Otto?" 

"Probably halfway back to Sporlock by now," ground Kat. "And, no, Chet, I don't have an idea in _hell _what we do! _You_ should know! Why don't _you_ tell _us?"_

Chet blinked, then looked down. "Idon't know," he muttered, awkwardly. "II can't see." 

"So you can see when you're in Sporlock, when we need to escape, when you need to creep John out, but you can't see when we need to rescue Otto! Are you doing this on purpose, to get him back for when you had to carry John?" 

Chet stared at her for a long time. "Of course not! I wouldn't take revenge on someone by giving them to _him!"_

She shot him an accusing glare, reaching down to the hardcover. Chet did not need his vision to guess what could happen with that book (and most likely his head) if he didn't pull something out of a hat. Something soon. Having no want to have any more bruises (he had enough from the needlemarks) he nearly spat out; "What do you think I am, some sort of psycho!" 

"Yeah!" she replied, hefting the book with a grunt. "I think you're a green-eyed freak who tells the future to get us all in trouble!" 

Chet blinked at her, stunned more then momentarily, "What do you mean?" 

"You told us to take the laptop!" She pointed a finger at him viciously as she spoke, dropping the book, "And you told us to take _him!_ And I bet if there had been a freaking gun, you would have told us to take that too! What the hell, Chet? What'd'you think you're trying to pull?" 

"Do you think I can control what I see?" he replied, voice chilly, eyes narrowing. "Do you think I even want to see the goddamn future?" He approached her, slinking in a dangerous sort of way, but Kat didn't step backwards. "You think I ever appreciated the taunts and the psychiatric _care_ - even from real professionals? I'm only human, and sticks and stones do break my bones, once in a while!" Now he was nearly shouting. "You think I MEANT to do this!" 

"I have no idea, Chet!" Kat, on the other hand, was most certainly shouting. "I just know that my friend would still be okay and here if it wasn't for you and your damn vision'! How the hell am I supposed to trust you after that?" 

Chet's eyes were now tight, laser slits. "I thought _I_ could trust _you." _he said. "I thought you were different from the rest of those small-minded, sceptical idiots. I thought I could trust you to understand and _not _blame me the second something happened that I couldn't predict! Obviously I thought wrong!" 

"Oh yeah? You know, I'm starting to think you really _are _just as crazy as your file says!" 

"And _you're _just as blind as-" 

_"HEY!" _screamed a voice. Both Kat and Chet shut up out of sheer surprise, and turned. Escher stood up, pale with fury, the bruise showing up starkly. She was an angry blot of purple and white, and looking absolutely furious. "Look at you two! You're fighting while Mereii is doing god-knows-what to Otto! Would you both shut up! Jesus! We need to DO SOMETHING, not yell at each other!" 

"That so-called precog' over there" Kat pointed a vehement finger, as if Escher couldn't tell herself, "got us into this mess and he can't get us damn _out!"_

"_Stop it_! Stop it stop it stop it!" 

The three of them looked at Star, who was firmly seated back on his hammock with his arms crossed. "Stop being all stupid and fighty and everyone listen to _me_." He hopped out of the hammock and stood up very tall, fists at his sides, and although this only made him look more childish, it definitely gathered all their attention. He cleared his throat and spoke. "We hafta get Kitty's friend back," he said. "The stealer stole him again, so we have to get him back. He made all those three-pointers, and I followed them, and they found Kitty for me, so he's _definitely_ not a stealer. He's" Star wrinkled his nose, thinking hard. "he's like the absolutely positively definitely _backward_s of a stealer. I like him." 

A sober silence followed this pronouncement. Then Kat sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, sitting heavily down on the nearest couch. "Ahh, jeez. You're right, both of you. All the time we're fighting each other, we're just doing exactly what that bastard wants us to do." 

"Well, you did promise Otto you'd stay out of it," said Chet, but he didn't look so angry any more, either. 

"You did?" said Escher, blinking. Kat frowned. 

"I kind of did" 

"Don't be a silly kitty cat," said Star, matter-of-factly. "You promised you wouldn't _interfere. _Rescuing's not interfereering. Rescuing's _rescuing."_

"Well said," Chet grinned, then became serious. "Kat, I know my advice's done more harm than good, but I _was _trying to help, regardless of how it looks. I did try to warn youthe way I see things happening isn't always the same as the way that they're _supposed_ to happen." He sighed. "You know, the first time I remember doing itseeing the futureI was sixteen. In an exam - I hadn't revised, I was terrified. And then I looked at my paper and II saw it already filled in. Of course, you can probably imagine how I felt." He snorted. "I felt like God had lent me his own personal getting-out-of-trouble hotline. I scribbled down everything i saw, finished in ten minutes flat." 

"Wow," said Escher. 

Chet looked at her. "Wow nothing. When we got our grades back, well, that was when I learned that there's a difference between knowing what answers you're going to writeand knowing the right answers." 

There was a pause. 

"Ow," said Kat. 

"Yes," said Chet. "And, you know, maybe the reason I can't see anything nowis because there are too many ways it could go." 

For a moment, the room was full of the sound of four people contemplating this. Then Kat stood up. 

"No." she said. "No, there aren't. There is _one way _that this is going to go. We are going to get in my car," she crossed the room, "we are going to get over to Sporlock," she grabbed her coat off the table and dug in the pocket, "and we are going to bust Otto out of there. _By any means necessary." _Extracting her keyring, she turned in the apartment's lobby doorway and brandished it at the other three. Her voice was level and deadly serious, but the warlike flame sparkling in her violet eyes would have made a platoon of Amazons look like a knitting circle by comparison. "Who's with me?" 

For a moment, no one moved. Then Star crouched and bounded onto Kat, who replied promptly with an noise that sounded oddly like a mouse being jumped on by an amused, stalking cat.

_"Gyeaaaaaa-_Star!" 

She took several steps back, staggering with the weight of the (at least physically) fully grown man. Her back gave out with his weight (it was more then he looked, that was for sure) and she fell backwards onto Chet's mattress, dazed. 

"I wanna come, Kitty!" he proclaimed, sitting on her stomach happily and looking down at her. "Can I? Can I? Pleeeeeease?" 

"Yes, Star," she squeaked as Chet's quiet snickering and Escher's giggles surrounded them. "Now can you please get off of me?" 

"Oh, sorry Kitty!" 

"Well, that's one," She sat up, rubbing her stomach. Star was now seated back on his hammock, looking at her and nearly bouncing around the room. 

Chet stopped snickering, looked at Star, and went over to sit down on his mattress next to Kat. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and grinned. "Well, I got us into this mess, and I better get us out. Isn't that what you said?" 

"Hey, that's not fair." Kat mumbled, and looked away. 

"Relax, I'm joining your little crusade," he smirked. "And anyway, you need me." 

"You're a bit fat liar." She grinned at him. "But I guess you can come." 

"You're so kind," he said, sarcastically. Kat smirked, and looked at Escher. The two said nothing, the silence punctuated only by the squeaky noises the bed made - Star had gotten bored of his hammock and had instead started to rediscover the joys of jumping on the bed. 

"For Otto?" Escher asked, offering Kat's keys. 

Kat snatched them, and smirked. 

"Mereii is going _down."_

It would have been difficult to thoroughly explain all of the separate thoughts that passed through Otto's mind, as he walked slowly down the fifth-floor corridor of Sporlock Asylum. Mostly, he felt numb, as if some part of him was already deeply anaesthetised. Through the window at the corridor's far end, he could see that the grey pre-dawn was starting to lighten, and guessed that it must be around six o'clock. 

**It is five point forty-nine point sixteen AM. **The actuator's voices were fast, eager to correct him. He smiled and half-nodded without changing pace. 

_Thank you._

Their anxiousness was transparent, and touching, in a way. It made him remember that moment, all those years ago, when he had first heard them tentatively reason that their true purpose was to help him. achieve his goals, whatever they might be. They were his creations, and they had learned so much, and even now, when there was a definite possibility that they would never talk to their host again, they were still trying to fit as much helpful information into the time still left to them. As annoying as their micro-accurate data sometimes was, it was comforting. 

Meanwhile, Mereii walked in front of him, currently busy with the catches on a large case that he'd picked up from his office. Despite his rather battered appearance, the psychologist evidently felt very much back in control of the situation; that much was clear from his stride and the curt ordering manner with which he had addressed Otto on the journey. 

_He thinks he can do anything he wants, _Otto thought, concentrating momentarily in order to see from the perspective of the upper right actuator, which was open and watching the man. _And he's right. Why do I feel so calm?_

**Because you are convinced that you have taken the right course, **murmured the voices. 

_I'm surprised you're allowing me to do this._

**We can see no alternatives that do not carry an unacceptable risk. We understand the likely consequences of our schematics being released. We do not thinkthat we wish for that to happen.**

Otto couldn't help a wry _huff _of a laugh. _You've picked a fine time to develop morality._

Mereii, in front of him, caught the laugh and smiled to himself. "I hope the voices are amusing, Octavius," he said. "Because they won't be there for long." 

A threatening rattle from the actuators, and Otto's brow wrinkled. John didn't seem to care, and both the doctor and his actuators knew that he was damn right not to. Otto had had a very good idea of what was in the heavy-looking case, and as Mereii stopped in front of one of the corridor's many reinforced white doors, the thought made him start to feel that same separation-panic all over again. 

Mereii swiped his keycard through the slot alongside the door, which opened with that familiar, hated _hssss, _then stepped aside, indicating the cell beyond. "Your new home," he said, acerbically. "I'm afraid it's a little smaller than the other one, but on the other hand it _does _have a door." 

Otto didn't even bother to glare at the psychologist, settling instead for walking past him, over the threshold, and into the cell. Apart from the size, it was pretty much identical to the one he had been held in for the last year; just as featureless, just as stark white. The tentacles clicked their distress, and he realised his own heart was pounding. He forced himself to get a grip. It wouldn't do to lose it now, not when there was so much at stake. 

**Father...** the voices whimpered, coiling up against him. **We're scared.**

_So am I._

One of his hands curled over one of the pitted claws as he continued, his thoughts even and smooth, to hide the tremble. _Even though I can't hear you, and you won't be able to hear me... I want you to know that I am here. And I don't want you to stop talking to me, either, whether I hear you or not. And if there's any chance that you can override your restraints, I want you to try._

**We will.**

A sharp _click_ behind him interrupted his thoughts. Mereii had followed him into the room, and was now removing four new-looking inhibitor collars from the case. He picked up one, the blue light flickering on as he activated it, and then with a rapid movement he reached up and locked it around the upper left actuator. The arm jerked back, startled, then shuddered and dropped to the padded floor with a hollow clank. Caught off guard, Otto gasped and lost his balance, the weight of the neutralized actuator yanking him down onto his knees. 

Mereii laughed, stepping forwards to lock the second collar onto the upper right smart arm. The claw pulled away and snapped open, menacingly, making him flinch. "Hold it still," he ordered. 

_Let him._

**Father**

_Please._

The actuator lowered, and Mereii cuffed it, smirking. "You know, this little adventure's made it pretty clear that I can't afford to keep you even as lucid as you were," he said, offhandedly, moving to the lower actuators. "Purely in the name of security, of course. Don't worry, thoughlike you told Kat; I'm sure some part of your mind will be awake enough to watch what's happening to you." 

"Mereii" Otto shuddered, the chorus in his head now halved, which reduced the volume but not the panic. Movement was becoming a conscious difficulty, and not just because of the immobilized arms. He forced his head to lift, trying to keep the shifting form of the psychologist in focus. He would be damned, he had resolved flatly, before he'd beg the man, but now the choking fear made him try reason, while he still could. "Think about this. Youthis is inhuman-" 

_"You're _inhuman, Octavius. I'mjust doing my job," said Mereii, calmly, picking up the final inhibitor collar. "You're a monster, and a murderer, and no matter how you judge the morality of _my _actions, I will never be anything like you." He smiled, an expression which even at its most triumphantly serene still carried that sour ashen undercurrent. "If this is anything, it's _justice."_

Otto gave up at this, and closed his eyes. He heard a fourth locking _snap, _and felt the projected numbness spread up the entirety of his back, the clamour of the final actuator falling abruptly silent. He kept his eyes shut, lowering his head, fighting the buzzing dizziness that was rising in its place. 

Straightening up, Mereii watched the kneeling doctor for a few moments. He looked a little disappointed, possibly due to his patient's lack of reaction. 

"I'll be back shortly," he said. "Thenwe'll see if we can't take your mind off your situation." 

Otto said nothing. He kept focusing on the inside of his eyelids, waiting. There was a further silence, then an exasperated snort, footsteps, and a closing _hssss._

"I know it's a tight fit," Kat said as Chet pushed his way into the backseat of her Focus, next to Star. 

"Kitty, I'm squished," Star squeaked, thoroughly jammed between Chet and the side of the car. Both Star and Chet were fairly lanky individuals, but the massive pile of papers that was there - heaps of old research papers about various interesting psychology.things - seemed to take up the space of a man of probably three hundred pounds, leaving minimal space for the remaining two. Chet, who was on the edge, took his time ruffling through her papers. He had been the last out of the apartment, and now his shuffling concealed a certain something that he had grabbed last-minute, and was now trying to hide in a pocket. 

Escher craned her head back to look at Chet, who was busy with the papers. She cleared her throat loudly to get his attention. "If you see anything, Chet, tell us." 

Chet looked up. "I see a big purple blob," he said, truthfully. Kat snerked as she pulled out, and nearly floored it. 


	13. Endgame

Deciding that it was far too much of a risk to go for her usual spot in the asylum's car park, Kat instead took her car around the corner to where they had parked before, where by some small miracle the same space was still open. Pulling up, she turned off the engine, and for a few moments the car was quiet and full of elaborate clickings as everyone tried to extricate themselves from their seatbelts in the confined space. 

"Sowhat's the plan?" said Chet. 

Kat drummed her fingers on the dashboard. "I'm thinking violence, with a side-serving of subterfuge." 

Escher raised her hand. "Uh, I'd go more for subterfuge with a side-serving of violence." 

"How about violence and subterfuge in equal helpings?" said Chet. 

"Done." Kat grinned and got out. Star stuck his head through the window (which he had wound entirely down on the way over) and then followed it lithely with the rest of him, jumping down to the ground. 

"Okay," said Kat, walking out from the corner, looking both ways prior to leading the way across the busy street to the asylum, "the first thing w- SHIT!" She stepped back so fast that she nearly knocked Escher, following close behind, into the clump of bushes on the corner, and flattened herself against the wall. 

"What?" hissed the younger girl, as Star peered curiously over her shoulder. Chet moved cautiously past them, staring up the street in the opposite direction to the asylum. 

"That was Mereii's car" he said, thoughtfully. "Where's he going, I wonder?" 

"Who cares?" Kat unflattened herself and turned back towards the asylum. "He's not in there. Advantage, us." 

"Hmm," said Chet, and continued to watch the traffic for another few seconds before following. 

The first floor of the asylum was pretty much deserted as the foursome made their careful way past offices and along corridors lined with lockers and equipment. Kat wasn't exactly surprised - one of the first things she had noticed about Sporlock was the general lack of activity; budget cuts, poor pay, and general mismanagement having taken care of the morale of most of the staff that would otherwise have bothered to show up on time. This didn't stop her from being as jumpy as hell, though, or from constantly glancing at Chet, hoping to spot the exact moment when the precog became aware of some approaching threat. 

They stopped in front of a door that had large, half-wall-sized windows on either side, covered in thin beige venetian blinds. Shielding her eyes from the reflections, Kat squinted through the slats, motioning for the others to stop behind her. Beyond, she could see the first-floor administration centre, a large bare room with a reception desk, a few benches, and the smallish closed-off box-type room that housed the building's security centre. The view through the teller window in the front of this was fuzzy through the glass and blinds, but Kat was willing to bet that the outline she could make out was that of a guard. 

Carefully, she reached out for the doorhandle and tried it. It went all the way down, then stuck. She cursed under her breath. 

"What's the matter, Kitty?" said Star, brightly. Kat winced. 

"Keep it down, Star, okay?" she hissed. "We have to get in there so we can get through the rest of the building without being seen. But the door's locked from the other side, and - hey, where are you going?" 

Star walked a little way back down the corridor, turned, then sprinted back towards the left-hand window. Chet, Escher, and Kat realised what was about to happen just about simultaneously, and threw themselves at the floor just as Star hit the glass like a boneless missile, going straight through it with a musical _crrrshhhhh _and amazingly little loss of momentum. He landed on the other side in a ball and rolled upright, shaking glass from his hair in a sparkling rain, then turned back towards the door and unlocked it, pushing it open with a delighted grin. 

"S'not locked anymore, Kitty!" 

Kat got up as fast as she could, brushing glass from her shoulders, and grabbed him by the wrist, pulling him down below the level of the ex-window. "Get down here!" she hissed, urgently, and hazarded a tiny look over the frame, just in time to see the guard emerge from the inner room and look around, a suspicious frown on his jowly face. She dropped again, sliding quickly down the wall with her back. 

"What's going on?" whispered Escher. "Did the guy notice?" 

"Yes! He's gonna see the window any second!" 

"I'm surprised he went through it like that," said Chet. "Aren't these kinds of places always supposed to have safety glass?" 

"This is Sporlock, remember? Safety probably costs more than regular glass," said Kat, risking another peek. The guard had a hefty rubber torch, and he looked like he wasn't afraid to use it. Out of ideas, Kat looked back to Star, who had hunkered down to her left and was watching her worriedly. 

"Star, uhmdistract the nice man for us, okay? Try and get him outside." 

The boy's face lit up. "Okie-doke!" Standing up, he pushed back through the door. The remaining three waited for a few minutes in silence, before a loud scraping _thud_ and a startled yell from the room beyond announced that Star had made contact. 

_"What the-" _

"Got your hat!" 

"-hey! HEY! Get back here-" 

There was a confusion of echoing, retreating footsteps, squeaking on the rubber linoleum, another crash (this time metallic andequipmenty-sounding) and then quiet descended again. When Kat finally looked up over the windowsill again, the lobby was empty. 

"Well, _that _worked out surprisingly well." said Escher. 

Kat gave her a sort of weird look before glancing at Chet. "Do we need to follow that golden path again?" 

"Not without no one watching the cameras, I would think." Chet paused to consider. "They may be recording" He shrugged. 

"Let's just go." Escher finally said after a long moment of the precog's thought. "And we'll see what turns out, okay?" 

"Let's go save some Octopus butt." Kat grinned, and the three headed down to the elevator. 

_Hello? _

Can you hear me? 

Talk to me. 

_It's too quiet in here. The walls eat the sound, the cloth deadens everything. I can't even hear myself breathe. I wouldn't mind if I could hear youbut you're not there. _

I need to talk to you, we need a plan, anything, to get us out of here. We don't belong in here, we have to get out. _Talkme. _

Iremember what you are. 

You you are mine. _My children _

I am here, and so are you. Oursours is a unity that cannot be destroyed. 

Only separated. 

Only 

Only 

Otto opened his eyes. 

The cell was still quiet and dead around him. He was sitting in the middle of the floor - he had, without realizing it, curled up into that same huddled shape which had worried Kat so much when she had seen it before. His head still roared with static. except 

He concentrated deeply, letting the lost, buzzing sensation fill him, searching through it for something different. Layers of deafening chaos, emptiness for a while he rode the catastrophe curve of his psyche, searching the reason and the madness for the shared places, the connections. He had often tried to do this before, over the years, out of curiosity or frustration, trying to better understand the nature of his mind's fusion with its artificial counterpart. It was as close to a meditative state as he had ever managed to achieve, and even in this situation, an odd wave of peace washed over him. For a moment he thought of falling, drifting through warm, caressing water, floating gently down towards release- 

**father**

_I'm here._

**father we're frightened. cannot hear. cannot see frightened help us**

_But I'm here. We have to go now. We're trapped in here, and we must leave. Don't be afraid._

**can't. please help us**

_I will not leave you again._

He felt as if he had never had to concentrate so hard on forming a single thought in his life. He was up against a program, an unthinking inhibitive circuit which could not be persuaded by logic, or by any means other than - possibly - superior mental strength. He felt his own intellect raging against it, a bright flame trying to bring down a sheer stone wall. It was a terrible effort, to catch the scratchy, stifled hints of his creation's words under the mental static in his skull, but even as the strain increased and sweat dewed on his forehead a part of him stayed utterly calm, listening, speaking. 

_I will always hear. I trust you. I am listening._

****

_Areare you there?_

****

Otto's brow knitted. He reached out for the nearest tentacle, still lying on the padding where it had fallen, the marbled rust-and-olive patterns of verdigris that covered its surfaces looking intricate and even warm in comparison to the plain, dull white floor. The metal was cool and soothing under his hand. He concentrated- 

-Then, without so much as a flicker; clarity. 

**We are here. We are listening, Father. **

Otto looked up. and smiled. 

"You know, if we had some sort of vague idea where Otto is, that would probably definitely help." 

Standing impatiently in the ground-floor elevator, Chet and Kat looked back at Escher, who replied by giving Chet a hinting glance. 

"Alright, let me try" He paused, leaning against the wall, staring into the space. His eyes widened then narrowed, concentrating, focusing. After a long moment, gritted his teeth and spoke, "Six.one of them" He paused, eyes narrowing further. A bead of sweat formed on his forehead and dripped into one vividly bright emerald eye. "Six.it's a six." 

After a moment, he gasped and leaned his head against the wall. The glance into the future had apparently tired him, and he closed his eyes, gathering his breath. "Can't see anymoresorry, Kat, Escher." 

"It's okay." Kat stepped out of the elevator as it stopped on the third floor. "Hey, look, I'm going to see what I can do about John's blackmail super-powers, okay? Worse comes to worse that means kill his laptop." She grinned a bit. "You two go on ahead and see if you can get Otto. Chet, if you see _anything_, tell Escher, okay?" 

The two nodded, and Kat took off for Mereii's office, leaving the remaining two quite stunned in her wake. 

"Let's go." Chet said, after a long pause. He hit the sixth-floor button on the panel, and the doors creaked, then slid shut. 

Kat rounded the curve of the third-floor corridor at a run and slid into Mereii's office, getting her breath back as she scanned the room. It was reassuringly empty, and on the desk 

"Bingo," she murmured, scooting the chair towards the desk and pulling the laptop towards her. The outward casing was a bit scuffed from where it had, variously, been dropped down stairs, hit by tentacles, and used as a method of physical assault, but when she hit the powerup the blue lights flickered obediently and the screen started to glow as she pushed it back. Kat guessed correctly that such a high-spec and expensive-looking machine probably had an almighty amount of shock protection built into it. 

The screen flickered and refreshed, taskbars and icons appearing. Kat looked at them for a moment, then clicked through to the CLASSIFIED folder, giving the same password as before and waiting with baited breath. 

FUNDING, EMAIL, PATIENTS. 

"Hmm" Kat tapped her fingers on the desktop. She hadn't exactly expected to find a folder called EVIL BLUEPRINTS OF DOOM, but the lack of anything at all useful-looking was still disheartening. Clicking around in the files for a while turned up nothing new, and it didn't help that her eyes kept being drawn to the clock like there were magnets in her retinas. Mereii had already been gone for more than thirty minutes, and something told her that she couldn't rely on a four-an-a-half-hour break this time. She pulled up the file manager and tried a general search. 

BLUEPRINTS 

Search is complete. 0 files found. 

ACTUATORS 

Search is complete. 0 files found. 

"Damnit" she hissed, starting to skip through random folders. "Where the hell" 

STAFF 

PROTOCOL 

INSURANCE 

Kat blinked. "Insurance" 

A double click brought up a request for a password. This time, Kat hesitated only a second before typing in the required response. For someone with so much technical knowhow, her employer appeared to be somewhat predictable when it came to protecting his files. Accessed, the folder revealed one file. Teeth gritting unconsciously, Kat clicked it. 

The screen flashed, then started filling and re-filling with the same data that she had seen it display earlier in Escher's apartment. Letting out an Indian war whoop with the volume turned down for caution's sake, she punched the air and sat back, grinning. 

"Insurance my ay-ess-ess. Hidden in plain view, you arrogant bastard. Now, let's see" 

She leant forwards again as the schematics stopped redrawing, and started to poke at the folder options. The program itself seemed to be written specifically for handling and displaying the blueprints, and was surprisingly intuitive. There was 

RECENT TRANSFERS 

"Yes!" 

FILE CURRENTLY QUEUED FOR DOWNLOAD. RECEIVING SERVERS 

She stared at the long list that came after this heading. Mereii hadn't been kidding. The blueprint file was linked to servers situated everywhere from Germany to Guam. If she screwed up, removing just one destination from the list 

hang on 

Clicking on the main filename again highlighted it. She stared at the screen for a moment, then closed her eyes. Offering up a short prayer to the goddess of technology, or the guardian of beleaguered eight-limbed scientists, or whatever the hell else deities happened to be listening, she right-clicked. 

And there it was. 

DELETE 

Hardly daring to breathe, let alone hope, she clicked again. 

CONFIRM DELETE 

Are you sure you want to delete this file? 

Kat had never been more sure of anything in her life. She clicked, again, and the laptop hummed. A bar appeared, and after a nerve-mangling moment when it seemed like nothing was happening, the first notch filled in with bright, blessed blue. She leaned back, watching, letting out a breath she hadn't even known she was holding, while she waited for the second 

The lift was slow climbing to the sixth floor. Inside, Chet leaned against the back wall, allowing his head tilt back on the cool brushed metal, letting the breath escape from him in one long sigh. For a moment, he stayed there, enjoying the feel of the chilled surface against the back of his head. From the outside, he looked quite relaxed, and could almost have been sleeping; but in the amberish glow that was the world behind his closed eyelids, a multitude of paths played themselves out, strands of future events unfolded around each other like threads unravelling from an old sleeve, twisted and tangled with such bewildering intricacy that they were almost nothing but a meaningless jumble of perceptions and images. And, in the centre of the interweaving maelstrom of happenings, riding in the eye of this temporal tornado as he had for most of his adult life, Chet watched evenly, waiting to understand. 

After a minute, he snapped an eye open and registered Escher, who was leaning against the side wall at a distance which didn't quite add up to the cramped space of the lift. He saw her flinch as he opened his eye, only a quarter of a centimetre perhaps, but enough to be a massive jump by his hyper-sensitive standards. Opening the other eye, he leaned off the wall a little and spoke. 

"Are you okay?" 

Escher nodded, a little too fast. "I'm fine." 

Chet sighed. "Look, you really don't need to be so nervous of me. I admit, I may have been. less than nice to you a few times, but I also have yet to bash you upside the head with a computer." 

The girl blinked at this, then grinned ruefully and touched her chin, where a neat Band-Aid marked the spot where she'd been KO'd earlier that day. 

"There is that, yes," she said. "Always a big redeeming feature, that." 

He smirked back at her, then became more serious. "I just want to make sure you know what side I'm on. Whatever it might look like, I'm not tagging along or helping you out for the entertainment value. I want to I _need _to" He paused, brow creasing, his breath coming hard while he tried to find the words. "to see what happens, here. To make sure it's the _right _thing, if I can. Does it matter to you that I'm not here because of your friend? That I'm doing this for closure? For, essentially, me?" 

Escher looked at him hard for a minute before replying. "I don't think you're selfish, if that's what you're saying. I mean, if I'd had all that junk done to _me, _I'd be right in there with a scythe, first chance I got." 

Leaning back again and rubbing the skin under one eye, Chet half-laughed. "Funny, that. People always seem to peg me as the vengeful type." 

His companion raised an eyebrow. From the multi-hued assortment of clothes she had uncovered in her apartment, Chet had gravitated straight towards a long-sleeved black t-shirt, the cuffs of which drastically overhung his long, spidery hands and had had to be turned back twice, and a pair of black pants which were sufficiently baggy to nearly hide the off-white rubber toes of his (shockingly, black!) tennis shoes. This ensemble, plus his gaunt, slightly equine features and Tim Burtonish frazzle of black hair, made him look as if he was just about to a) slope off and perpetrate some particularly mournful poetry on a wall somewhere or b) go queue for a Manson concert. That was even _before _ you got to his those-have-_got_-to-be-contacts fevergreen eyes, or the hollow shadows beneath them. 

"You don't say," said Escher, her face commendably straight. 

Chet sighed. "Escher you and Kat and Otto you're pretty much the only people who have ever trusted the things I saw enough to act on them. Whether you intended it that way or not, that's like the biggest thumbs-up anyone has ever given me, ever since this first started happening. Apart from anything else, it's the first time I've ever had the chance to use this so-called gift' for anything other than pissing people off." 

"Or creeping them out." 

"Exactly. I'm not used to being believed I don't know if you can understand-" 

"What are you talking about?" interrupted Escher, eyes widening. "You don't think I can understand about not being believed? I am like the _queen_ of not being believed, Chet. It's my Jeopardy subject. If being talked concernedly about and worried over and analysed and just about everything bar actually being _listened _to was an Olympic sport, I'd be heading the damn _team. _After the stuff that happened with Otto, I had to put up with years of stupid sympathy and pointless medication and a squillion different types of theraputic'" rabbit ears, "shit, before I was old enough to say I was fine and actually be taken seriously. I promised to protect my friend, which was fine, except it turned out that in order to do that I had to play the poor little traumabunny for so long, I nearly wound up believing it myself. I've stared at enough damn inkblots to last me till I'm seventy! I'm not saying I had it anywhere near as bad as you, but please believe me when I say I know exactly where you're coming from. Like, if you're Cassandra, I'm Helen." Escher paused at this juncture, frowning slightly, her extended index finger wandering somewhat as if trying to trace the path of her point. "If, uh, if Helen had actually not minded being abducted by Paris and then had to go back home to Troy and have everyone hovering around her going on about how terrible it must have been." A longer pause. "It wasn't Troy, it was Greece. Troy was whereyou know what I mean, right?" 

A deep Zen-like silence reigned for a moment after this query, while Chet quietly tried to coax his logic processes back from wherever they had run off crying to during the latter part of Escher's tirade. He eventually managed a sort of steamrollered smile, and a nod. 

Escher beamed sunnily. "Cool. Glad we got that straight. Anyway you're not all that creepy. I know about creepy. Creepy is looking in someone's eyes and seeing nothing there. No-one could say that about you." 

Before Chet could reply, the lift dinged, and the doors slid back, with a complaining rattle that spoke of long-overdue maintenance. Looking around carefully, Chet headed out straight away, and Escher followed him, wrinkling her nose at the scenery that greeted them. Perhaps the lights were a touch more bluey, or the ceiling a shade lower, or maybe it was something intangible in the air, but this corridor's atmosphere was definitely even more of a clinically desolate mental wasteland than the one above it. The girl shivered, and almost without thinking about it increased her step to catch up. As a result, she nearly walked straight into her taller companion, who had stopped dead in the middle of the passageway. 

"What is it?" 

"Not sure-" 

So saying, Chet tilted his head to one side, like a dog listening for a whistle. Then he turned and half-sprinted back past her, beyond the lift doors to the stairwell and the single window this contained. Escher hesitated, then hurried after him. By the time she arrived by his side, the lanky precog was stretched up off the highest step which allowed him to reach the window, craning to see out and down, head inclined as far as safety allowed, and then some. 

"What _is_ it?" Escher repeated, knowing full well that her own just-over-five-foot height wouldn't let her get anywhere near the narrow frame. 

Chet let go of the sill, dropping down and landing in a tense stoop a few steps down from her. He looked up, and it took no special ability whatsoever for her to be able to guess what he was about to say. His expression was answer enough. 

"Mereii." 

**Running systems check **

Receiving diagnostics 

Parletal lobe connections operating at 100. Cerebral connections operating at 0. 

Otto sighed. He was still sitting on the floor of the cell, one hand still spread against a closed claw. The fact that he could hear their precise, anxious chattering through the static in his mind made his claustrophobic surroundings incrementally easier to bear, but he had to admit that his physical situation hadn't actually improved. He was, for want of a better word, stuck. 

_You can't move at all?_

**We are trying. The motor and movement inhibitor circuits appear to be a closed system. We do not think it is possible to interrupt them.**

Otto tapped the claw with his fingers, like an orator on a podium. _In that case, _he thought, _when Mereii comes back, please be quiet and don't distract me with anything which might make it difficult for me to act neutralised. _

The actuator's voices were innocent. **What do you mean, Otto?**

Their host smiled dryly, and shrugged his trenchcoat collar a little higher up his neck. _I know you too well. Let's just say that I would find it difficult to keep a straight face if all I can hear is you telling me exactly how you'd like to deal with him._

**Father **There was a greater twist of worry in the voices when they next spoke. **If he if he hurts you again, you may become unable to hear us.**

_I know. _The smile slid and was replaced with a frown, although the fingers still didn't cease their thoughtful tapping. _We can only hope that does not happen._

The actuators gave the mental equivalent of an uncertain nod. Sighing again, Otto shifted a little, trying to get more comfortable on the uneven, padded floor, and continued to think. 

Barely thirty yards away, in the sixth-floor corridor, the panic was mounting up nicely. 

"What, he's back already? A-are you sure?" said Escher, giving Chet a rabbit-in-the-headlights sort of look. He nodded at her, vehemently, his own expression tinged with nausea. 

"Believe me, if you felt the way I do every time I know' that man is going to be included in my short-term future, you wouldn't be asking that. It's like a cross between drowning and a slug trailing across my brain." 

"Ew." 

"Yes, exactly," said Chet. "Go get Otto, and if I don't come back up by then, try and get out the back way." 

"Hadn't we better warn Kat-" 

"There's no time!" He shook his head, agitated impatience in every movement. "We're talking minutes - I have to hold him up - one way or another" 

Anything further was lost to her as he turned and began to pelt down the stairs, taking three at a time. 

"Be careful!" yelled Escher, as the clattering of his footsteps died away. When there was no reply, she backed up onto the sixth-floor landing again, shook herself slightly, and started along the corridor, looking through windows and observation slots into the deserted cells beyond, searching for the right one. 

"COME ON!" 

Kat's nose was about a quarter inch from the laptop's screen. Her _sang-froid _upon solving the puzzle of the hidden folder had not lasted very long. In fact, it had deserted her as soon as she'd realised the kind of time it was going to take for the deletion bar to fill up completely. At the moment it was only about halfway there, and to add insult to injury it was completely unpredictable; the blue level creeping up in fits and starts that seemed to the waiting girl to be the program equivalent of Chinese water torture. As a result, her heart was thudding like it was trying to escape her chest, and she was quite literally on the edge of her seat. 

"GET A GODDAMN MOVE ON!" she screamed suddenly, slamming a palm into the desktop next to the keyboard. 

The bar filled up one more notch. 

Escher raced down the hallway, her shoes squeaking. Chet's urgency to run into _his_ future had only made her more nervous, and she found herself hurling head-first into her own. She eyed every room equally quickly, figuring as a man in a brown trench coat and giant mechanical tentacles oughta catch her eye pretty quickly. Also, most of the rooms were empty. Sporlock was a wasteland. 

She spotted him in 618 and checked every one of her six pockets for Kat's keycard. Murphy's Law being what it was, it was in the very bottom of the sixth pocket under two pencils (which injured her hand) an open marker, and a pair of crumbled pieces of paper. She slid it through the door, and it opened (thankfully) with a hiss. 

"Otto!" she nearly shouted, dropping to her knees in front of him. "Otto, it's me Escher, you've got to remember me, you saved my life before and we almost fl—" 

"Escher." Otto looked up, setting a hand on her shoulder. "I know who you are." His dark brown eyes didn't smile like his mouth did, but he tried. "I'm fine, and so are they." 

Escher beamed her now-trademark pinball smile and hugged him briefly. "So why haven't you broken out yet?" 

"The link between my mind and theirs is a different circuit from their ability to move." 

Her smile failed. "Huh?"

"The barrier keeping me from hearing them is different from the one keeping them from moving. We need to break the collars in order for me to get out of here." 

Immediately Escher nodded, groping for the nearest one, trying to find out what she'd popped out the first time around. The metal was smooth under her fingers; whatever she'd undone last time, she couldn't feel now. She frowned this was getting more and more annoying. A little bar in her head was filling up, preparing for the super-special pinball attack. 

"Where's Kat and the others?" He asked. 

"Kat is on John's computer, Chet is distracting John, Star is.I don't know where Star is." She shrugged. The thought of that doctor' only made her more aggravated, and she didn't want to think about what John would do to Otto if he (eventually at least) got here. 

"Come on, we have to go back to Kat!" 

"If I could _move_, maybe" 

Escher decided that she would go by one of her old theories, which had been successful for both annoying bugs and little brothers. This, coupled with her growing agitation, would make a combination that had to work: 

When it annoyed you, step on it. Step on it a lot. 

Escher put the actuator down and stomped on the collar as hard ash she could. She stumbled off several times, but after a minute of angry jumping and throwing a nice tantrum on the collar, there was an unpleasant _whrck_. Followed by much better noises. 

_click. whirrrrrr. kreeee-skritch. _

The actuator lifted, a pierce of the collar falling off, and bared the familiar spike. It reached over to one of it's cousins as Escher found another actuator to stomp on as hard as she humanely could. All in all, it was good for taking out her anger on. 

When she had finally exhausted all her fury at John and the collars and the general state of the world on the inhibitor, it rose up. The other two had been successfully freed, and Otto stood, smiling. 

"I'm pretty sure Kat can handle herself. Where is Chet?"

"He went to distract John.let's go find him." 

The two of them sprinted off to the stairs, heading to the garage. 

Chet arrived in the asylum's side lobby quite a lot faster than he had intended, skidding the last few yards in a stationary position as he turned to see out of the door. What he saw made him thank whatever gods might have been listening that he hadn't delayed any longer upstairs; Mereii had already gotten out of his car, which was parked in its usual space in the almost-empty lot, and was now halfway across the area, heading for the main entrance. 

Without putting too much thought into what he was doing, Chet sprinted forwards, _whomped _through the heavy glass seal door, took the steps in two jumps, and fetched up against the side of Mereii's BMW. Wincing, though not so much at the shock of the impact as the lack of effect it had, he slid around to the opposite side of the vehicle, huffed in and out a couple of times to restore his breathing to normal, then took a step back and kicked the car squarely in the sleek curve of its front left wheel arch. 

The alarm went off, quite spectacularly. A small flock of pigeons erupted off the asylum's distant roof, and somewhere nearby (as is almost a certainty with this type of thing), a dog started barking. Mereii stopped in his tracks, stayed like that for a moment, then turned around slowly. 

What stretched out over the next few seconds couldn't exactly have been called a silence', because it is somewhat difficult to categorize anything as silent when it is filled with the urgent clamour of a high-end, 120 decibel car alarm. Nevertheless, it somehow managed to _feel_ extremely silent. 

Chet leaned back against the side of the car and looked at Mereii, and Mereii looked back. Eventually, and without blinking, he raised his keyfob up to about head height and aimed it at the car, which lapsed into silence with a final sulky _bwoop. _With the alarm gone, the lack of any noise seemed to slam back over the parking lot like a wave, just as startling as the racket had been. Chet held the psychologist's gaze for a few more moments, while he waited for the ringing in his ears to subside, and then smiled. 

"Hello, Johnny." 

Mereii had changed his clothes, once again a smart and tidy blank page of normality in his black jacket and white shirt, the inevitable tie like an arrow-straight exclamation mark inked on his narrow chest. His eyes narrowed as he regarded his ex-patient, the bruising around the left still clear but well on the way to fading. 

"Karos," he said. "Well, well. I really would have expected you, of all people, to have more sense. Me agreeing to leave you alone does not equal a licence to come back here and assault my property." 

"Oh, absolutely." Chet smiled. "Just wanted to make sure I had your attention, that's all." 

Mereii edged, impatiently, shooting a quick glance back at the building behind him. "Right, well, you've got it. Now what?" 

Chet _tsked, _shaking his head. "Why the big hurry? What's wrong, can you see it too? That something's coming for you? If so, I'm impressed, even I can't tell what it is exactly" His voice hardened. "But I can see enough. There's a shadow creeping up on you, Johnny-boy, I can see it hanging over your head like the biggest tidal wave you ever saw. The Big One. And when it breaks, well" Chet smiled, then continued. "If you leave, get in this car and go _right now, _you might just outrun it." He held up a hand as Mereii opened his mouth. "Ah, don't get me wrong. I know you won't listen to me. Butoh, I just wanted to tell you anyway. Because now, you'll know - afterwards - that you _could have done."_

A short silence, then Mereii sneered. "Put a sock in it, Karos," he said. "I've had just about enough of you and your threats." 

"Come on, now, John." Offended or amused, the ghastly grin didn't change. "This is _me. _That wasn't a threat." Before the psychologist could move, he raised a hand and touched him directly between the eyes with one long index finger, pulling back easily to evade the reflexive swat. "That was a _prediction."_

Mereii glared at him, backing off, rubbing his forehead with his knuckles to get rid of the feeling of contact. "Don't ever do that again." 

"What makes you think I'd want to?" said Chet. "You've come out of this pretty well, haven't you? Your secrets are safe heh you still have all your limbs I have to say, it seemed kind of unfair to me. Not any more, though." He shook his head, laughing softly. "Not after what I saw." 

He took a step forward, equalising the distance between them. The wormwood-green flare in his eyes was even more pronounced than usual, and each iris seemed to float on a wall of serenity, of calm, irrefutable _knowing. _And then, just when it seemed to Mereii that the psycho couldn't possibly _get _any creepierhe started to sing. 

_"On topof the skyis a place where you goif you've done nothing wrong"_

"Shut up, Karos," said Mereii, weakly. He started to walk forwards, although it was unclear whether he knew why, or even if he knew he was doing it. "Shut up." 

Chet paced backwards, out of reach, grinning. His mellow, drawling voice was remarkably loud in the silence of the empty lot,the rhythm unstoppable as a bee bouncing against a windowpane. It was like a spellor a curse. It certainly sounded more like the latter to the infuriated psychologist, and each further word seemed to deepen the strength of it, to grind the syllables into his brain like salt in a wound. 

_"And downin the ground"_

"Shut UP, I said-" 

_"is a placewhere you goif you've been a bad boy-"_

"SHUT UP!" They had now nearly completed one full circuit of the car, one stalking angrily forwards, the other stepping back with an easy unintimidated grace. 

"Don't like that one, Johnny? The old ones are supposed to be the best, you know." Chet cocked his head, that viper's smile even more terrible for the delight in his eyes. "Or are they? Sometimessometimes, the old ones are the _worst."_

Mereii stared at him. Then he made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat, and turned away towards the main doors. 

As if his next action was written in bright neon in the air before him, Chet suddenly saw what came next. He took one-two-three steps forward, reached down and scraped a fair-sized stone out of the parking lot dust, and threw it without aim or discretion. Almost entirely caught up in the flood of events as they swept through the present, giddily one jump ahead of the world, he was only marginally surprised when it bounced off the back of Mereii's head. 

The psychologist spun, hand flying to the place and coming back slightly bloody. He stared at the blood like it was some kind of alien substance, and then looked up at Chet. The expression on his face, in those pain-narrowed grey eyes, was truly frightening. It spoke plainly of a resident shoulder demon which had not only murdered its halo'd opposition, but also buried it without a trace beneath the metaphorical patio. Chet, himself a master of all things creepy glare-ish, nevertheless found it seriously difficult at that moment to resist the impulse to get the hell out of the way, and let whatever it was that lived behind those eyes take its fury out on the nearest inanimate object. The trouble there, however, was that he could all too easily imagine who that inanimate object would be. Balancing on the buzzing highwire in his head where the future rushed into the past, high with the one-way thrill of it, Chet saw clearly that only one more push was needed, and exactly where it should be placed. 

"You're going to _crash_ and _burn,_ Johnny-boy." he said, lazily. "You've lost. You just don't know it yet." 

In the moment of stillness that followed this pronouncement, Chet saw John's right eye twitch, just once, a perfect textbook spasm that yanked his lower eyelid up like a cricket jumping under a glass. It was so quick and classic that Chet wasn't sure if he had actually seen it or not, and what happened next made it a little difficult to enquire. 

"DON'T," screamed Mereii, suddenly, "CALL," hefting his slim black briefcase like it was some kind of samurai weapon, "ME," and hurling himself across the space between them, _"JOHNNY!'"_

Startled, Chet brought his arm up just in time to save his face from the briefcase, which struck his elbow and sent shockwaves right up his arm and across his shoulders. Before he could even gasp, Mereii slammed bodily into him, and he was knocked flat on his back, landing painfully in the loose gravel of the lot. 

_Well done, _said a little voice in his head, as he landed. _Diversion successfully created. Now, perhaps we can move on to extracting ourselves from it, before we end up in intensive care._

Rapidly, he tried to turn over, and succeeded relatively easily, but since all this meant was that instead of lying on his back with Mereii on top of him he was now lying on his front with Mereii on top of him, it wasn't really much of a gain. He felt a knee, bony as hell, hit him between the shoulderblades, and then his thoughts were forcibly derailed as the psychologist grabbed a double handful of his hair and started to slam the side of his head repeatedly against the ground. 

Chet gagged and struggled, spat gravel, and tried to shake him off. Taking advantage of the next time his head was yanked up, he managed to lift his head and keep it up, despite the pressure. Encouraged by this, he kicked sideways, attempting to pull himself out from underneath. 

The next second, Chet learned a new and interesting fact about John Mereii; to wit, that he was a secret nail-chewer. He discovered this detail by proxy, as the severely short but ragged things were dragged viciously across the side of his face. Realising that Mereii was trying to find his eyes, Chet panicked, lashed out with a foot, and felt it connect. His opponent let go with a yelp, and Chet threw himself forwards, snarling, temporarily abandoning the idea of escape to another, far older impulse. 

The two men rolled over, spraying gravel, kicking, punching, struggling. Chet curled in on himself and rocked back like a ball, then uncoiled and thudded the soles of his shoes squarely into Mereii's stomach. The psychologist howled incoherently, and punched him in the ear. Recoiling, Chet tried to do it again, but this time he missed, and before he could attempt anything else, Mereii's hands closed around his neck. 

It was like being strangled by a vise. Wherever the scrawny doctor was getting the strength from, it probably had less to do with his actual muscles than with the psychotic fury that was currently possessing him. Choking, Chet looked up into a pair of eyes that had as little to do with reasoning humanity than the sights of a guided missile, and redoubled his efforts to prise Mereii's long, constricting fingers away from his throat. 

"Youhave no idea" wheezed the blurring shape above him, squeezing harder, "howmany times I'vewanted to do this." 

Chet struggled, but even this was becoming progressively more difficult. His stamina, weakened by years of incarceration, was fast draining out of him, and darkness was starting to crowd in on the edges of his vision. Try as he might, he couldn't see so much as a flicker of his own future now, nothing past the roaring void that was partly the blood in his ears and partly the throttled rasp of his own breath. As the darkness spread and opened to enfold him, blinding at last 

he realised calmly why that would be. 


	14. Trapped

A _whomp, _a sharp _skatch _of kicked gravel, a gasp, and a yell. 

_"STEALER!"_

The next second, Chet's world exploded. From a quiet nowhere zone of sensationless calm, pressure and pain flared back into existence, flooding the dark desert behind his eyes with the blinding force of a ten-megaton nuke. The black that his world had dissolved into burst in a spatter of points of brilliant white light, flashing across his vision like a thousand tiny stars. 

He gasped, and then tried to gasp again when he realized that he _could. _This, however, was somewhat ineffective and caused him to go into a coughing fit, rolling so he was face down on the pavement. 

This small drama caused him to effectively miss the other noises going on in the parking lot. The noises that he didn't hear might have registered as another fight if he had indeed heard them. But he hadn't, so they didn't, until someone nearby screamed, and from the coppery feel of blood on the inside of his still-closed mouth he guessed that it hadn't been him. 

He couldn't see, could only take a stab at what had just happened. Struggling for oxygen, still crushed under a terrible band of pressure that seemed to have descended across his chest and throat, he wheezed his way through the tedious business of resuming breathing was settled. Turning face up again and opened his eyes. he tried to yell something appropriate. 

"AAGH!" 

Most of his vision, which had been fully possessed by the night sky, was now filled with blue and white and black. His ears were now filled with a somewhat excited, rather young and squeaky voice. 

"Hi, Chet! What are you doing on the ground?" 

Chet blinked furiously as his eyes came into focus, taking in the rest of the face that hovered three inches over him. He groaned, and shook his head. "StarWhere's John?" 

"He's eating the pavement, but I don't think he likes it very much." At a bit of pushing, Star got off the precog, and motioned over to the psychologist. Said man was spitting out gravel and trying to stand up, looking murderously at the pair. 

Chet sat up quickly in the eight-limbed-mutant-snow-angel-shape his fight with Mereii had swept in the parking lot's grey gravel, his chest heaving desperately as he gulped air and choked on the dust in it. The light was still rushing back, and bringing his vision with it, the sheer onslaught of shapes and colours stinging his eyes, and he welcomed it. He hacked and coughed, surprised at the effort it took to stay sitting upright, for he was still nearer strangled than he knew. There was something important nagging at him, something he had to do- 

-and, in a flash, he remembered what it was. 

"Star!" he yelped, attempting to use his still-lead-weight legs and failing. "Don't let him get up!" 

"Okay!" 

Before Chet could elaborate, Star straightened up, and took a flying leap at Mereii from a standing start, landing on his back WWF-style before pulling him forcibly to the ground again and landing on top of him. Kneeling, Star used his knees to pin the man's arms to his sides, holding him down despite his struggles with the simple and effective method of a single hand starfished across his face. The boy looked exhilarated but slightly panicky, and an even more bizarre touch was added by the security guard's hat, which by some miracle was still perched on his head. 

"Chet! He's all squirmy! WhatdoIdo?" 

The precog scrambled over to him, digging in the pocket of his pants. "Hold him still," he managed to say, although his voice was a harsh scrape that nettled the back of his throat. However, it was still perfectly audible to Mereii, who started to fight even harder to get away, and Star, who redoubled his efforts to hold him down. 

Finally extricating the flat grey case from his pocket, Chet speedily shelled the little green-filled ampoule from its padding into his palm. Tossing the box aside, he grabbed Mereii's pinned left arm and dragged the sleeve back, shuddering at the touch of his bare skin. 

"What'cha doin'?" said Star, craning to see past his own shoulder. 

Chet looked up for a moment. He regarded Mereii's face, still mostly covered by Star's hand, and the one, furious, terrified grey eye that was visible between the fingers. 

"Putting him out," he said, quietly. "Or down." 

Then he dropped his gaze, tapped the needle, and slipped it into and under the skin of the psychologist's arm, depressing the plunger swiftly and evenly until the barrel was empty. In that moment, his own automatic efficiency frightened him; he had been right in thinking he could do this in his sleep, but the experience was not a pleasant one. 

It was evidently no picnic for Mereii, either. He froze up entirely at the feel of the needle, and the noise he produced in response was not so much a scream as a retching, crushed-rat squeak. Chet withdrew after a few more moments and stood up, dropping the syringe as he did so and watching the fragile glass shatter and glitter against the gravel. 

"Let him up, Star," he heard his own voice say, still in that quiet, matter-of-fact tone. Star looked at him in surprise, then gave Mereii's face a final shove and got up, stepping back to stand just behind his fellow ex-patient. 

"Sorry, Johnny," said Chet. "It had to happen." 

For a few moments, it looked like Mereii's paralysis was permanent. Flat on his back, staring upwards without seeing, he didn't so much as twitch. Then, with a shuddering gasp, he stirred and got to his knees, and the look he gave Chet then was sheer one-hundred-percent-proof poison. And sheer one-hundred-percent-proof _lucid _poison, at that. Standing, straightening his glasses, he examined his arm, eyes for no injury other than the tiny bright drop of blood that beaded there. He dabbed it away carefully with a fingertip, and then drew his left sleeve dismissively down over the site, rebuttoning the cuff as he spoke. 

"And exactlywhat did you._expect_ to happen, Karos?" he hissed. His voice was punctuated by deep steadying breaths but was otherwise flat, and utterly deadly. "Did you really thinkthat a solution intended for a, a _freak_ like you would have any effect on me?" 

"Was kind of hoping, yeah." Chet said, dryly. "Can't think why, you being the soul of sanity and all." 

Mereii sneered, backing away. "Well, looks like yourtalent' let you down this time, doesn't it?" He spread his arms mockingly, presumably to indicate his own distinct lack of catatonia. "And the deal's off, incidentally. For your information, I _might _have kept my end of it, but now" He stooped momentarily to retrieve his briefcase, shaking his head. "And you can rest assured that your _friend _will know exactly why, and exactly how much that his so-called friends respected his," he spat, _"noble intentions, _to happily go back on their side of it for the sake of some mindless antagonism." 

Chet appeared to think for a few seconds, and then smiled. 

"My talent' has never let me down yet, John." He tilted his head, and the smile widened. "But anyway, I can see you're busy, so" 

The psychologist backed off further, his expression torn between smugness and fury. Either way, it wasn't pleasant, and his words even less so. "You are _all _going to pay for this." 

"We'll see, won't we? And good luck" 

Mereii growled something and turned his back on him, stalking off fast towards the main entrance. 

"you're going to need it," finished Chet, mildly. 

As Mereii disappeared from view, Star suddenly yanked on the back of Chet's shirt, dislodging a small cloud of grey dust. "Chet?" 

"Hmm?" The precog continued to stare in the direction of the main doors. "No, it's okay to let him go this time, I think-" 

"Nonono, Chet, what's that sound?" 

"what?" Chet turned to him, eyebrows arching. "What sound?" 

Star pointed in the direction of the parking lot's single entrance. _"That _sound!" 

Chet stood still, baffled, straining to hear anything out of the ordinary above the normal muted city clamour around them. A long pause, and then 

"That, Star," he said, a new and decidedly concerned expression unfolding across his face, "is the sound of trouble." 

Back in the comparative calm of Mereii's office, bothered by no noises apart from the racing of her own pulse, Kat slammed the lid of the laptop down and grinned an adrenaline-fuelled grin. Pushing the machine back so it was more or less in the same position as it had been when she had discovered it, she hopped out of the chair and made for the door. 

Sprinting headlong for the stairs, she thought she heard the _ding _of the lift behind her, but by that time she was well around the curve of the corridor and away. Elation and nerves practically gave her wings, spurring her to take the stairs several at a time and nearly resulting in an extremely serious injury when she rounded the bend between flights at somewhere around 10m/s and met an actuator coming the other way. 

The actuator curled like a cut zipline to avoid a collision, caught her around the waist with only enough impetus to knock a little of the wind out of her, and set her down on her feet on the landing. Otto arrived a second later, with Escher clattering to a halt behind him. 

"Otto! Are you okay?" Kat managed, breathing hard. 

"It depends. The blueprints?" 

"Deleted," she shot back. 

Otto let out a long, fervid breath of his own, and the actuators chittered and shrilled in triumph. "Then yes, I am." 

"Where's Chet?" Escher asked her, anxiously. 

Kat blinked. "I was about to ask you the same thing. Have you seen Star?" 

Escher shook her head. 

Otto frowned, digging in a coat pocket. After a moment, he produced his shades, flipping them open. "Perhaps they-" 

Before he could get any further, all four of his smart arms _skreeeeked_ urgently, coiling around behind him to face the stairwell window. Wordlessly, he turned, fast, and strode towards it. 

"What is it?" said Kat, half-running to keep up. 

"They hear sirens." Otto slid the dark lenses up over his eyes and made a slight gesture, and the lower two actuators bunched beneath him to lift him over the stairwell and up to the window. The upper pair continued to hover, sentry-like, tilting their claws slightly as they listened. For a moment or two, there was utter silence in the stairwell as the two girls also concentrated, trying to pick it up. 

"I can't hear anything," said Escher, finally. "Are you - are they sure?" 

Otto looked down at her briefly from his high vantage point, a touch of humour lifting the corners of his mouth. "Believe me, they know what sirens sound like." 

"Okay, well, let's go!" Kat jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "There's a back way, emergency stairs on the second floor. If we move now we can be half a city away before they get here-" 

"That's a good plan, Kat, but there's a small problem," said Otto, shading his eyes to peer downwards out of the smeary stairwell glass. "Or two." 

"Huh?" 

"Chet and Star. They're both down there, in the parking lot" An actuator chirped by his ear, clacking its claws in agitation. "They're trapped." 

And trapped they were. Almost back to back now, nearly in the dead centre of the space, Chet and Star stood listening to the approaching cacophony with almost identical looks of helpless tension growing on their faces. The lot was a bare rectangle of gravel, boxed in on three sides by blank concrete walls and on one by the side of the asylum itself. From the gate at the far end which opened straight out onto the street, the sound of sirens was now not only clearly audible but increasing with each passing moment. In terms of the use for which it was intended, Sporlock's car park was almost completely empty; and in any case, the sparse scattering of cars that remained in the spaces were useless as cover. The only other exit was the side door of the building, and it was towards this that Star suddenly bolted, going from stillness to a sprint just as suddenly as a mouse racing for its hole. 

"Star, no!" Hurling himself after, Chet managed to grab Star's wrist, digging his heels into the gravel and fighting the boy's peculiar and superior strength. "Listen to me! If we - if either of us - go back in there, we won't come out. Ever!" 

Star turned and stared at him, and Chet blinked back, hardly aware of what he had just said. Even as he tried to replay it, however, the visions broke back over him in a wave, voices, scenes- 

_-corrupt management- _

-methods, though cruel and unusual- 

-congratulations due, to the new administration- 

-fair process of reprofiling for all our current patients- 

-to hand it to him. The man was insane, but he made the right calls- 

Little by little, the present filtered back. Chet shivered in the warm dusty air, feeling somehow aged, for although it had lasted for less than a second he felt like he had watched years pass. "There'll be an inquiry," he said, slowly. "We'll be reassessed. And they'll find" He swallowed. "They'll find nothing different. Certifiable, for both of us" 

Star wailed, though not as loud as the sirens. "I don't wanna be certifiabled!" 

Chet shook his head, searching the area, looking so hard he felt like his eyes were about to bleed. Looking for something, _anything, _any way that forked out away from the future that he had just seen, some way to go which didn't show him their two timelines dragged together neatly and shackled, forever, to that of the bleak building that loomed over them. 

But all he could see was one word, and so, despairingly, he said it. 

"Up" 

Behind him, his companion's dismayed expression went as suddenly clear as sunlight shafting through clouds. Star didn't exactly understand everything that was happening right now, but there were things he definitely _did _understand completely. Fast-approaching hostile banshee-type noises and weird and scary-sounding prophecies were one thing. But "up"? 

Star could _do_ "up". 

He grabbed onto the wrist that already held his own and bounded forwards, towing a startled Chet in his wake like an angler who has unexpectedly hooked a plesiosaur. Stretching up with his free hand, feet in fast-fraying socks finding impossible footholds in the sheer surface, he started to climb the concrete boundary wall. Dragged behind him, Chet did his best to copy this feat, slipping and falling back as his own feet left the ground. It was just about as much as he could manage to keep the best part of his weight off of Star's arm, scrabbling for non-existent ledges between the breezeblocks with his other hand while the boy fought to pull them both higher. After a few seconds more epic struggle against gravity and common sense, Chet felt a lurch and heard a happy yelp, faint over the now-deafening sirens, and squinted up to see that Star had just tried and succeeded in lurching upwards and getting his hand over the top of the wall. 

"Okay, Chet! Now what'd'we do?" 

Chet opened his mouth to convey that he hadn't a clue, but before he could say a word two things happened. Firstly, the first police car screamed past the gate in the opposite wall and slewed to a halt, presumably as a prelude to reversing through ninety degrees into the lot. This would have been impressive enough on its own, but as it was it was rather overshadowed by the second thing. 

Accompanied by the sort of skull-rattling _SKRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAASHHHHH_ that is generally only heard on major building sites just after someone at a safe distance depresses a T-handle, the fourth-floor window of the building above their heads exploded outwards, taking a large part of the wall around the frame with it into an expanding cloud of debris. Glass and chunks of brick soared serenely in all directions for a moment, before starting to rain groundwards and rendering the centre of the parking lot (where Star and Chet had formerly been standing) about as safe as the area under a blown-up asteroid. In the street outside, the second police car to round the corner ploughed straight up over the kerb and embedded itself a wisteria bush, its driver apparently a little too distracted by the explosion to remember the concept of a straight line'. 

Launching from the rising cloud of masonry dust like a renegade eight-limbed comet, Otto plummeted out and sideways, actuators snaking out beneath him to their fullest extent. Smacking into the wall to which Chet and Star clung on both sides, the arms contracted to absorb the force of the fall, landing their host spectacularly on the foot-wide ledge at the top. It was ridiculously narrow, but thanks to the mathematical precision of his assistants' he balanced perfectly, the scuffed toecap of one boot inches from Star's white-knuckled fingers. Behind him, both piled somewhat uncomfortably on his back, Escher and Kat held onto the doctor's shoulders and grinned at the other two. 

Otto smiled momentarily as well, and then reached down, two tentacles acting in tandem to the movement. 

"Need a hand?" 


End file.
